As for "damaging children": in this context that is a value judgement. I don't deny the possibility of mental cruelty but encouraging mental laziness is more common, and I've experienced that more in other subjects, personally.

Well here's the point (are you listening, believers?). Education is about showing children (and everyone else, as it happens, but as we're talking about children...) how to acquire knowledge. As a teacher myself, I can honestly say that I have never met a good teacher who would deny that the best way of showing children how to acquire knowledge is to give them the skills to learn, not to try to pour "knowledge" all over them. I had knowledge about Shakespeare, Beethoven and poetry poured all over me at school, and I can't remember a single thing about any of it. But I did acquire the skills to learn, and everything I now know about Shakespeare, poetry and Beethoven I've learned for myself. I've gone out and grabbed knowledge for myself. Because there were a few good teachers who knew how to give me those skills. Giving children the skills to learn involves getting them to question the legitimacy of everything that is fed to them by adults. They must question everything, put it through the same sceptical wringer as all scientific assertions must be put through by the scientific community. Don't accept anything at face value. Ask for evidence: how do you know that what you're telling me is true? Who told you that? Can you give me your sources and show me how I can check them for myself? Religious instruction, including the herding children to church services and making them bow their heads in parroted prayers full of false certainties or making them sing silly hymns, breaks all those rules. It is damaging and abusive, it is teaching children not to question, and is highly immoral, and leads the planet into all sorts of needless difficulties. It has nothing to do with education, that's a fact. If you educate children in the true sense in nine lessons out of ten, then send them to their tenth lesson in which they are told to believe in God lest vile consequences follow, you are confusing them and abusing them. And saying that your input to them is benign, makes social sense for your particular neighbourhood or contains "greater truths" merely says an awful lot about your inability to escape the baleful grip of your own poor education. One day I'll tell you what I really think. ;-)