I was once a victim of Catholic schooling

Yeah, so was I. I feel your pain. I once got stuck in the corner for an entire day for asking why there were similarities between Lucifer (the "Lightbringer") and the Greek myth of Prometheus. I even had that real-life horror story happen, where I was in the confessional and the priest had left his microphone on...
Oh, and my whole family was booted out of the parish when they bent to my will (and my screaming and crying) and agreed to let me go to public high school. Not that that didn't suck ass too.
Oh, but college was great!

Despite popular myth, Catholic school isn't that bad. Most people who tell horror stories about what the nuns did to them are making it up or exaggerating. Not to say it never happened, but my mother told me she was in both Catholic school and public school, and she found the public school teachers to be harsher than the nuns. I enjoyed my Catholic school; I recieved a good education in an enviornment of peers who (mainly) had the same belief system as I did. I wasn't taught to be close minded, and have only been called so once (by someone who was incredibly close minded and angry). I wouldn't trade those years for anything.

I spent seven and a half years going to Catholic elementry school. It wasn't hell but it wasn't heaven. Overall I think the quality of teaching was really kinda lousy, but I think that about a lot of elementry school teaching.

What I do dislike is the warped view of god and religion that I was taught in that time. Maybe it was this school, maybe it was just these teachers, but I find the Catholic world view I was raised with to be repugnant and soulless. As soon as I quit going to private school and started at a public school I found myself questioning everything I was taught. And I found it quite lacking. Catholic--->Agnostic--->Atheist was a quick transition for me. Not only was I disillusioned with the Catholic Church but also I assumed all religions were like this. It was only many years later that I started to overcome my aversion for things religious, or especially Christian.