Some good insights in this thread, folks, but let’s not talk about Hunter as if he isn’t here with us; it’s sort of impolite.
Here is the root of the poison tree.
The rest of your post is just high school angst, all kids feel alienated from the world, their teachers, and attempt to pushh boundaries and assert independence. The real let-down was not your school, but your parents who did not live up to their obligation and promises they made at your baptism.
1ke wins the thread (not for the first time).
Hunter, I mean no disrespect to you with what follows, because you cannot help being what your environment has helped to make you. Much of this stuff applies to me, too, and I only recently gained insight about it, and am working to overcome it. But one cannot help but notice certain common words that appear frequently throughout your original post. I did a quick search in Word. About 20 instances of “me” or “my,” a whopping 54 of “I.” Yes, that’s case-sensitive and whole-world only.
This is an extraordinarily phenomenological approach to Christianity, which is exactly the wrong one to take. The argument, to the extent there is one, seems to be “a very small group of Christians didn’t validate me, therefore I don’t want to be a Christian.” Followed by, “some other religion did validate me / stimulate my emotions, therefore I want to follow that religion.”
When you approach Christianity with this sort of attitude, of course it’s going to leave you dissatisfied. Because Christianity doesn’t exist to validate you. It’s not about you at all, except in a relatively narrow sense. It’s about God, primarily, and then about everyone in the world but you, secondarily. The whole theme of Christianity is charity, which is selfless action for the good of others – of total self-sacrifice, of dying to oneself (at the very least figuratively, and very often literally) for the sake of others. I suspect this is why modernity hates Christianity. If you don’t understand this, you have missed the point, and need to reevaluate everything in your life. I assure you that until you
do understand, you will never, ever find meaningful and stable happiness anywhere in life.
I hope this little bit of critical insight (which, as I said, I only just recently came to understand myself) helps you.
While I agree that we certainly need more people responding to their call to vocation, I don’t think that there is a simple correlation between the “nuns and priests” leaving the classrooms and the decline in the quality of religious education.
Nuns and priests can be just as heterodox as any layman.
Indeed, that’s part of what’s gotten us to the point of this mess.
What we need, I think, are more vocations to marriage. I don’t just mean more people getting married, I mean more people getting married
because they understand that they are called to it, not because they want sex and companionship and personal validation. People who take their duties to their spouse and children (and God) seriously. We need good Catholic parents first, or else an army of good Catholic priests can do nothing. Faith starts at home; the sensibilities must be trained before the mind is. The latter is the priest’s job and educators’ jobs, together with that of the parents, but the former is (well, ought to be) pretty much exclusively the parents’ purview.
) Actually, if he were writing a resume in anticipation of getting a job - with the same care and attention he gave to this post - I think these failings would be quickly identified in a negative manner. In my opinion, this sample of his writing style hardly qualifies for recognition as a ‘scholar’. 
Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter.