Prayer In Public School Analysis

In response to Charles Homeyer’s letter I would like to say that I agree with him in saying that gun control is not the answer to all our problems. Nevertheless, I would like to respectfully disagree with him by expressing that we should not put prayer and Bible readings back in public schools because as we have seen in the past, there are many disadvantages such as increase in violence and an encroachment on parental freedom and responsibility. The separation of church and state is indicated for a reason and although those exact words are not written in the U.S. Constitution, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the separation of church and state in their interpretation of the first amendment. The words, “thus building a

In 2002 Jonathan Zimmerman wrote a book Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public School, which dissects how religion was taught in the classroom in the past, why it has not worked and thus why we should not allow prayer back into the classroom today. During the common and progressive school eras, the battle in America was whether or not to teach religion in schools, but by the 1940s the questions changed to which religion schools should teach. Therefore, Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Evangelicals

Board Of Education case they wanted to get rid of WRE because religion was technically still in schools. While some went against this court ruling, by the 1950s these WRE classes began to settle down. “Anticipating the eventual demise of WRE, states and school districts established in-school religious exercises that all of their students-at least in theory- could accept” (150). This was the inter-faith. However just like during the common school era religion in schools tended to lead towards one religion or another. In this case this “Inter-faith” tended to be strongly Christian and many were not