Man, I loved my middle/high school’s religion classes as an Agnostic.
It was a super fancy prep school, so they went all in with the religion classes being ‘academic’ with the teachers needing a relevant PhD or Masters.
I still remember my very conservative Old Testament teacher writing all sorts of passive aggressive statements across my envelope pushing essays and then begrudgingly giving them A- grades.
The other teacher for NT and electives was awesome though. Instilled a real passion (pun intended) for the material with fun classes that did things like look at early Christianity as a cult and the sociological factors going into it or reading bizarre apocrypha like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which in later years I realized was less ‘bizarre’ and more subversive and probably even satirical).
Religion could be a really cool class, and it’s a shame cowardly institutions try to make it “indoctrination by any other name” as opposed to “let’s learn about the criterion of embarrassment and Peter’s denials.”