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Notes -
What you’ve listed are leisure activities. Video games, fantasies, sports, and playing an instrument are for leisure. (Unless a student is exceptional, they have just one hour a week of a violin teacher or something which may constitute non-leisure education, I suppose). The fact that students do not typically learn from books/teachers in an organized setting away from their school system strongly indicates that school has a monopoly on non-leisure learning. What we can call “book learning”. But book learning is an essential part of religious indoctrination, which means it is an essential part of the exercise of religion. A human is simply not able to absorb “book learning” after ~6 hours of secular education with 1-2 hours of at-home work. To me this means that we have thwarted the free exercise of religion. We have overburdened the right.
One hour is more reasonable, but adding an hour of book-learning on top of the modern school curriculum is an unreasonable burden. I think up to two hours is acceptable.
Category error. Religion is not mere special interest or mere hobby. Religion is a special protected activity for a reason: it encompasses urgent, existential and totalizing moral concerns. It’s its own category of human activity. And the believer necessarily believes that the education in his religion is urgent and essential.
Your theory of taxation is not an enshrined right. But freedom of religion is such a right. It’s both more logical and more just for the tax revenue from a religious group to go toward that group’s religious education — not with extra money, because that overburdens their right to religious exercise. If they are paying for 18 “credits” of high school, then allow them to substitute 8 of these credits for up to “8” religious credits. This way the school is not funding religious education except with the funds of those who desire to practice their right to pursue religious education.
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