Actually, over here public schools are also private schools, i.e., neither are state schools. We also have academies (both secular and religious), foundation schools, comprehensives, community schools, grammar schools and religious state schools. It's all a legacy of our tendency to flip-flop between Labour and Conservative governments who have different views on education and NEVER stop tinkering, even with their own favoured type of school. We got through nearly a century on one Education Act until the 1950s, now we get 2 or 3 new ones per year.
Anyway, I'd rather teach in a secular non-selective school (the majority) but I'm applying everywhere.
The Catholic Church has an unusual relationship with science and scientists. Individuals in the Church seem to push forward our understanding of science (the Vatican has had an observatory for centuries and a lot of early work on evolution was carried out by a monk within the Catholic Church), but then they decide it contradicts something they hold to be important and condemn someone before acquitting them centuries later.
They're getting better though. It took 4 centuries to acquit Galileo, only 150 years for Darwin. They should take on board Relativity in the next decade or so (although I don't think they've actually had any issues with this).
One of the main reasons for Europe surging ahead of the Arab world was the invention of the printing press. The Arab world had benefited from easy exchange of ideas because of the common language encouraged by Islam. It still took time to copy up any texts though. The printing press changed all that. Even a translated text could then be spread very quickly across the whole of Christian Europe.
Interestingly, the competition could have been much fiercer. Italian merchants offered printing presses for sale in the Middle East and demonstrated them with copied versions of the Koran. Not being familiar with Arabic, they made a few mistakes which was seen as sin as the Koran is, according to Muslims, the direct word of God and cannot be changed.
"We need a spell check."
What browser are you using? If Internet Explorer, try something more modern - Google Chrome and Chromium have built in spell-checkers so millenia comes up with a red wavy line under it (it's millennia). I think Firefox has something similar, either by default or through an add-on (I have the British English language pack installed).