From first to eighth grade, I went to a small, private, Catholic school where the population probably sat around 400 students. That was it. That was the entire student body. When I went there up until about a year or so ago, it never occurred to me there was anything wrong with the education I got. In fact, I accredited it for the reason why I am the person I am today. While that may be part of the reason, it definitely isn’t the full reason nor does it dismiss some of the cons I’ve recently discovered of my once assumed perfect Catholic education.

At the time, wearing a uniform everyday didn’t bother me. I didn’t have to fret about what I was wearing to school because I’d look like everyone else. I didn’t have to bother with makeup or jewelry, because we weren’t allowed to wear any of it (unless of course, it was a cross). However, starting at a public high school in 9th grade was a huge wake up call for me. It was then when it hit me just how much people care about their appearances and I immediately felt like an outcast for not caring as much about mine. I didn’t know how to put on makeup or come up with cute outfits, so I spent the better half of my freshman year looking like I’d gotten dressed in the dark. Although, I would like to kick the whole wearing a uniform doesn’t provide kids with a sense of individuality argument to the curb, because your external experience and how you decide to dress shouldn’t be the only thing that sets you apart from others. I understand that to some fashion is a form of self expression, but just because I wore a uniform to school everyday didn’t mean I wasn’t my own person. It just left me with little to no fashion sense (which I’m still slowly recovering from).

Another more detrimental con of attending a Catholic school was how I was more or less forced to believe something that I didn’t fully understand. When talking about it with my mom recently, she said she figured she’d provide me with a religious background and when I was older I could choose whether or not I’d continue to practice it. Yet I’m afraid that most parents who choose to send their children to Catholic school don’t have the same mentality as my mom did when she chose to send me. They want their kids to believe the same things they do, so they pay money for those beliefs to be instilled into their children's brains beginning at a young age. Which is wrong on a number of levels. People should be able to think freely for themselves, not have their parent’s beliefs forced upon them.

Calling it brainwashing would be a bit extreme, but for lack of a better word, my Catholic education brainwashing didn’t stop when I moved on to high school. I decided to further my religious practices by attending confirmation classes and eventually getting confirmed during my sophomore year of high school. During one of the classes, our instructor talked about the horrors of abortions and urged us all to march on Washington with her in a Pro-Life rally. Naturally, I’d sided with her without a second thought. I was taught to believe that abortions were a horrible sin and had rushed home that night where I eagerly asked my dad if I could go protest abortions. I was devastated when he had said no. But now? I couldn’t be more grateful. At the time I’d been taught that the subject of abortion was very black and white. Nobody told me just how grey it really was. It makes me sick to think at one point in my life I had been taught that something was so wrong -- when I, with the knowledge I’ve garnered through my own freewill, now know what’s really wrong is to take away a woman’s right to choose. To instill the belief that women shouldn’t have that choice into a young child’s head should be considered an evil in itself.

Before my extremely religious grandmother decides to never talk to me again after reading this, I feel as I should point out that I understand everyone feels differently about religion and that it’s a hugely controversial subject throughout the world, right up there with politics. There’s nothing wrong with believing in something, just like there’s nothing wrong with not believing in anything. The only thing wrong is forcing your kid to believe in something before they’re old enough to understand. Because kids shouldn’t be taught to believe that if they don’t pray a certain amount of times a day or go to church every Sunday that that automatically qualifies them as a bad person who is doomed to the fiery depths of the underworld after they die.

If my kids decide to believe in a heaven or a hell (because it should be completely up to them), I’ll tell them that all they have to do in order to get into heaven is to be a good person.

Shouldn’t it be that simple?