I think you can read Donuel's "religious schools in NYS" as being "the religious school I'm familiar with". I had a few friends who went to Catholic schools, and they seemed to think it was the Civil War.

When I was scoring tests, I remember there was one response from a kid in an un-named state in the south, who answered a question about fossils something along the lines of "The Earth is only 6,000 years old, so those dinosaur bones were put there by people, but what you WANT me to say is..." and then, the kid gave a perfect answer. Kid got full credit. Education, after all, is about providing a base of information.