Some background to this question I live in a rural bible belt area that leans almost exclusively protestant , so my knowledge of areas with strong catholic populations is very lacking . When I ask this question , I ' m assuming when you talk about Private Catholic Schools , you live in a generally well populated areasuburb , which may or may not be true or relevant . If you ' re atheist and PCS is an option , don ' t you have the option for wellrounded , wellfunded private secular schools ? I ask because I ' m atheist as well and having gone through a lot of the indoctrination I did when I was a kid from Baptist and Protestant sources , I ' ve basically decided I ' d fight like hell to make sure that my kid didn ' t have to roll through all that . I ' ve heard that Catholic schools are better in some regards than the . teaching tactics that I encountered as a kid , but are worse in others . Then again , as the background states , most of what I have to work with on Catholicism comes from TV shows that rotate around the New England areas . So maybe I ' m overstating a problem that you ' ve already considered .