I must add to one assertion that you made:God forbid you should mention religion in any other than a negative light, you will be called a far right fanatic.The same is made if you should mention religion in a negative light. Then you'll be called a left-wing pinko. Oh my, yes, of course you are right. There is so much time that could be spent teaching your children about your religion outside of the school. Absolutely. I didn’t send my children to school to learn about religion or to learn morals. I handled both of them and as a parent, I think it is my job to do so. Just because some parents fail, there is no excuse for anyone to usurp my role as a parent. The parents would be responsible for educating their children on their beliefs. Right now, it appears that religious folks want the government and public school system to do that for them as well. Now, this one I don’t understand. I don’t agree or disagree, I just don’t understand. I don’t consider myself to be a “religious” person, just a spiritual one. I don’t know when, except for the prayer in school thing, that the religious people have wanted to have religion taught in school. I think that I have seen them trying to get things OUT of schools, not IN them. I don’t like the fact that I couldn’t send my kids to school with a Tylenol but they could easily come home with a condom. The entire school thing is a mystery to me and since mine are all out, I don’t really have a dog in that fight except to say that we should encourage individuality in schools, we shouldn’t try to turn out a bunch of little robots. When I was in college, I took that US History 1865 to present course and the professor did nothing but teach us his views on ICBM’s and how many we had as compared to the USSR (it was a long time ago). He never even mentioned Reconstruction, WWI or II, the Depression or even how the Cold War developed. He just espoused his views on the administration at the time and scared the pants off of a bunch of 19 year olds. Far too many teachers feel as though it is their responsibility to teach things other than whatever subject they were hired to teach. Of course, there are some wonderful teachers out there so I certainly don’t want to offend them, but a science teacher should teach science. Nothing more and nothing less. A teacher should be like Johnny Carson, always pleasant and never tipping their hand so that you could tell what political party they belong to. But, if a certain community decided that they wanted a certain subject taught or avoided, they should have the ability to dictate that. We as a nation are supposed to be a melting pot of many different cultures and beliefs. There isn’t one of us bright enough to speak for everyone us so we need to allow varying views to be taught and discussed. That was the whole purpose of freedom of speech. Every view has value, even if it is just to warn us of the extremes and the possibilities that exist. If you shut people up, you don’t change opinions. You just force people to sit and simmer. They end up getting angry and they blow up buildings or live in “compounds” armed to the teeth. Technically, we have the ability to speak freely, but we really don’t have it socially. What we lack is the decency to listen to each other and the maturity to consider what we have heard. So many people just dismiss another’s opinions out of hand without taking the time to even attempt to learn something from it. This attitude is horrible, it has spilled over into the political realm so badly that they are really disabled. Poor man wanna be rich and rich man wanna be king so they all have their own reasons for wanting to win the next election. They are kind of frozen in a place where they can’t do a thing. The money available to a politician is so insane that they would have to be saints to avoid being persuaded by it. It would simply cost them too much to lose. Take Social Security, an issue that could bankrupt us and not one of them has the nerve to state the obvious, those rules were made when we were supposed to die before we did much harm. Now that the average life span had been increased so much, we should change the retirement age for Social Security. DUH. You wouldn’t even have to do it overnight, you could just phase the age up a little bit at a time until it reaches a reasonable limit. Hard working people with children should not have to pay their money to people who wanted to stop working for no other reason than that they could. Do you realize that some of the richest people in this country still get that stupid SS check just because they are over 65? How stupid is that? This thing was never meant to be a retirement plan but now people feel entitled to it. And no plan that the government ever instituted was ever stopped. Once they have a plan, they hire people to carry out that plan. Now, they don’t want to lose their jobs, so we have all of these silly plans that have long ago outlasted the problems they were meant to solve. Now, if someone in power ever said any of that, they wouldn’t be in power anymore. We are so screwed. By the way, I read that Japan is attempting to convince their people to “never retire”. Now, those Japanese have the discipline to listen and to seriously never retire, making them very strong as a people. I would hate to have them as an enemy...ever. If they are already telling their people to never retire and we are paying ours to do so, we won’t be the strongest country in the world for any length of time now, will we? If you want to retire at 65, save up the money to do it like the people who want to retire at 55 do now. History is written by the winners and you can’t keep on winning for long unless you cultivate a winning mentality. Right now, we are learning to hate the winners. 14 year old girls today are swimming faster than Johnny Weismuller did when he won the Olympics. That’s what competition did for us. But in our schools, they want to stop giving grades and stop competition because they are afraid that someone might feel like a loser. Well, if you do away with all of the losers, from where do you get all of the winners? Meg