Prayer Back in School

Growing up in a home with two parents, both from what was called then and now "The Bible Belt" of America. I remember hearing the stories of when they attended school and how they would all stand at the beginning of class, and would bow their heads in a word of prayer to start the day. Even though that was over 50 years ago and times might have been a little easier, no one complained about how the schools started the day out with prayer. In the year 1962 the Supreme Courts stepped in and abolished prayer in the public school system. After doing so, there has been a steady moral decline in our public schools. America needs to bring back prayer into the public schools.

William Bennet, former Secretary of Education, states that "after prayer was outlawed in the nation there has been a steady decline in the morality of children in public schools." Bennet Believes there is a strong correlation (a reciprocal relation between two or more things) between the expulsion of prayer from our schools and the decline in morality: * ("moral decline")

* These are Bennet's statistics, but I put them into a chart for easier understanding.

According to the Truth Magazine Website, in Educational Leadership Magazine's May 1989 issue, M.W. Edelman states "We share no mutual goals or joint vision - nothing to believe in except self-aggrandizement (exhibiting self-importance). The poor black youths who shoot up drugs on street corners and the rich white youths who sniff cocaine in wealthy suburbs share a common disconnectedness from any larger hope or purpose. The rising rates of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and out of-wedlock births among youths of all races and income groups' reflect a moral drift that cries out for correction." (truthmagazine1989)

As a Youth Pastor and working with kids of all ages, I have observed kids going through many changes in life, there is a difference between the kids that have a consistent prayer life, and the kids that don't share that type of commitment. As a person grows through life, they begin to realize the mistakes and hardships that one endures. From the early 1940s thru the 1960s before prayer was abolished from public schools, the children of America were taught at an early age what was right and what was wrong. Sometimes people slip and fall, and realize they are headed down the wrong road; sometimes they make the necessary changes. Sometimes they don't. The public schools of America need to bring back prayer, because when there was prayer, our sense morality was much higher, children respected their elders, and respected others in general.

However, whether or not a child is raised in a Christian home or in the home of someone who doesn't believe in anything at all. America needs to take inventory of herself and see what roads the kids of this nation are headed down.