Prayer out of schools?

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Is anyone else saddened by this? I know prayer has been forbidden in most of the schools I have gone too,however I dont get why?
You dont have to force anyone to pray, and when you do you dont have to force anyone to hear nor see you praying. I have always pray/prayed in my head, before I was even aware that it was forbidden in schools.
So with that being the case why is it forbidden? Or at least why is it forbidden in the schools that I have gone too?
After all prayer is supposed to be just talking with God, it WASNT a mandatory thing?

From my personal view, praying and religion is something absolutely private. So i dont think, there will be problems by older kids, but with young kids in kindergarten they would ask, why they are doing this, because they do not understand religious groups and so on.

So if you are telling a 4 year old kid, that now you are "just talking to god", he will believe you. When hes coming home then you have to explain him the whole religions stuff, why people believe in religions, in gods, what sorts of religions are existing, where are the different between greater religions and where are the different between groups like catholic and evangelic, mormons, why they departed... and so on, which is from my opinion a bit much for a four old kid. I also think it would be confusing,when a small kid is confronted with another opinion on that topic every view hours. So its not a good comparison, but if your child finds out the truth about Santa Claus then you usually accept it and do not try to convince him to believe in Santa Claus again and so on... because a child would be confused if he gets told something else about Santa Claus every two hours. With something so important like an religion, i think you should not mess around in this way.

So if i send my kid to a catholic private school, sure, then i have to expect that tehy will be praying. But on a public school i expect that my kid is teached math, writing, languages...not religious customs.

I agree with that. Prayer has no place in public schools. When I was a school kid in the UK, we were all forced to say prayers aloud and to sing hymns praising Jesus and the Christian god or be beaten. I was first beaten with a cane when I was 11 years old when the headmaster noticed I wasn't praying aloud. The physical abuse continued over several years. As far as I was concerned school was for learning academic subjects, not for brutal attempts at brainwashing.

Yeah, but there is a middle ground between teaching religion customs to kids, and expecting them to disregard their own religion.

*sigh*
Kids can pray to themselves all they want, at least in the US. They just can't disrupt class to do it, or harass other students because their religion tells them to, and they can't do it as a representative of the school (ie, over loudspeakers or as an official part of a cheerleading routine). It is an overt fallacy to claim that kids can't pray at all; even the ACLU can and will jump on that and defend kids' rights to pray.

Really now-? My friend got sent to the principles office for praying right before he was about to eat lunch.

Not really. A kid wants to pray, he can pray at home or in his head. In a public school, he can focus on his work and try to educate himself.

I read the bible and i would not know, where there should be the part, when Jesus told his followers to pray every day with their class together and to force his comrades students to be present while doing that, when you have math. So i wouldnt know, why someone should regard his religion because of not praying at school. In my country religion is no part of the school itself. But it is offered to you, that your children can visit additive religious lessons if you want and most religious parents do so. But noone is forced to visit this lessons, they are free and after the age of 14 the child itself must agree to it too, so he cannot be forced to go there from his parents if he has chosen not to believe in it. Also muslims with strong believes (normally you say, its ok if you are doing one of the five daily prayers, but some want to do all five of them) are offered a quiet room if they want to make their prayers during the day. So they can go there and practice their religion.

So no disregarding, because everyone can practice his religion on his own and nobody will forbid you to speak a prayer at lunch for your own or gather yourself with some others that believe to, to pray together before lunch. But as it is free to pray for those who want to do it, it is free not to pray, if you dont want to do it. So as long as your are not a follower of a religion who is centered about forcing others nonbelieving to ueseless pray, in which they dont believe, which is against law anyway in my country, there is no disregarding.

If a class colleague is praying, ok so its a private habit. So personal and privats habits are easy to explain to your own children. But when an educator tells a child that he is forced to pray, and so on, i think its much harder to keep him separated form this stuff, because the kids trust a teacher/educator to tell him true and relevant stuff. Or as example: "Hi Honey, what did you learn today?" - "We learned that 1+1 = 2 and that an invisible man is sitting upon us, watching us even when we make toilette and we will all perish endless pain if we dont act like our teacher told us that the invisible man told us. And we read a book, that told us to cut off the foreskin of our slain enemies during our wars, so that our king can count who many enemy soldiers have been killed. Mommy, where do our armies keep the foreskins they gathered from their enemies, and are they sent to Obama personally or does he visit Afghanistan once a year to count them?" -.-

So yes, this is an extreme example (But yes, this is really a part of the old testament, thank god we have got calculators nowadays. ^^) but i just want to be sure, before i visit the zoo next time with a child, that noone told my child that all he has to do is to believe in god, as Samuel did, so hords of wild animals want harm anyone and so on. So as much as it is your desicion if you want to talk to your child about such things, i think its my desicion if i dont wann talk about such things all day.

I'm not arguing in favor of prayer being mandatory, the topic starter indicated that the discussion was over whether individual prayer should be forbidden.



In his head meaning what? Not involving anyone else? Then sure, but I get the feeling that's not what you mean, and that doesn't really leave a whole lot of options for Muslim kids. Just sayin'.

In my opinion, religious activities at school including prayer should be entirely voluntary and pupils should have the choice to participate in such activities as an extra-curricula activity. Prayer should neither be denied to the pupils nor forced on them.

I´d agree, this is a natural part of the free choice of religion for me. So as long as you are not making a loud chorus or preaching out of your private lunchprayer, so others would be disturbed, but keeping it in normal talk volume for you and the ones who want to join you, i´d see no point against it.

I am Sorry, i thought the discussion was upon forced praying, which was usual in times of my parents. So they had to pray each day befor schoolstart and on special days of the religiom and the first and last day of school they had to go to the church all together. Sorry, that i missunderstood.

The social pressure to conform is real. Those kids who do not pray will be beaten bloody by bullies in the school yard.

There is only one answer: Prayers at home or in church. NOTHING of that sort in the public schools where all sorts of tax payers carry the freight. Atheists and Agnostics pay taxes too.

The American Constitution is very clear on the matter. No Establishment of Religion. Not a bit of it.

ruveyn

You make a good point Ruveyn. The converse would be true in the UK now if praying was optional - virtually no kids would participate and they would be the ones considered different and likely bullied in the school yard. I can just picture school dinners too... a small minority of kids saying grace before a meal... they'd be laughed out of school by the other kids. The only way I can see religion working at school if it was an extra-curricula activity i.e. voluntary outside school houses with a voluntary (unpaid) teacher willing to take a religious class / prayer group, study of bible / koran / other religious text. This would work in much the same way as other extra-curricula school clubs... like the science club I used to attend and do my own experiments.

In the UK, the vast majority of religious schools are state funded, and there often isn't a good secular school in many areas (especially ones with high numbers of nominal Catholics). Prayer and Mass were mandatory in my day. It's a strange situation where religion plays very little role in public life otherwise, yet in schools it's everywhere.

Dawkins is right.