My answer is yes, by the way. My seventh-grade home-room teacher was a minister in the Church of God in Christ, and he absolutely refused to follow the prohibition against forced prayer. This was in 1982-83 (I think), and at the time, Memphis City Schools had enacted a daily moment of silence to begin the school day. But our home room teacher was having none of it. Sometimes he’d lead the class in prayer his ownself; sometimes he’d pick a student to lead it; on a few occasions I can recall he practically taught Sunday School.
Nor was he satisfied with a non-sectarian prayer. There was a comely girl the class named Tiffany (of course I remember her name, as I spent a sizable portion of my junior high years trying to get her pants off) who happened to be Catholic. When it was her turn to lead the class in prayer, she (a) recited the Lord’s Prayer, and (b) chanced to leave out the final few lines of the Protestant version. He was quick to correct her and told her in front of the rest of us that she didn’t know the real version because she wasn’t going to a holiness church.
Anyway, that’s just me. Anybody else get forced to pray in an American public school? Contrariwise, have any of you been denied the right to pray privately in public school?
I grew up in rural Maine. My town was predominately Catholic. And by predominately I mean every single family except ours, and one other … and then another when the Shapiros moved to town - and what a huge stink that was.
Anyway … one of the classes that we attended, in public school, mind you, was Catechism. And I mean it was a regularly scheduled class, right between math and history. No shipping the good Catholic kids off to church for the afternoon – the public school teacher led the class in Catechism lessons.
I was only about 9 or 10 at the time and I didn’t even know what Catechism was, just that all the other kids told me it was something they all needed to know. When I told my parents about it I got to be excused, with the one other heathen kid in my class, so that we got to sit out in the hallway and stare at the walls while the class went on.
And yes, I did catch shit from the other kids for not taking the class.
In high school we had a “moment of silence” in the mornings. I was told on several occasions that I could not read during that time, although there weren’t forced prayers.
The week before Easter was always “Religious Emphasis Week,” in which members of the various Baptist churches around town would perform skits during mandatory assemblies that were designed to preach to us the good news of Jesus’ sacrifice for our ever-lasting souls.
No. I went to public school in Portland, Oregon from 1954 to 1967. The only religious utterance was “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, which I just omitted when I was old enough to figure out I didn’t believe in it. There were no prayers or moments of silence, no invocations in assemblies, or anything like that (that I can remember, anyway). There was probably some recognition of religion around Christmas, but my schools had a healthy Jewish population so even that was tempered with secularism.
Roddy
No on either being forced or prevented from praying, but we did A LOT of activities back then (1970s and 1980s) that were considered perfectly fine but would probably raise eyebrows now – I’m thinking of things like having worksheets to color around the holidays that included snowmen and reindeer, as well as angels and nativity scenes.
Oh yeah, something else – and this has eaten at me for 20 years.
When we filled out our little entries for what we wanted it to say under our senior pictures in the year book, for my goal I put in: “I seek the holy grail.”
This was determined to be blasphemous so it was just not included. I had no goal. Still don’t, apparently.
My memory of second grade is a little hazy, but I distinctly remember being allowed to read a prayer out loud to my class on at least one occasion. The only reason I remember is that the prayer contained the word “sacred” and I said “scared.” I think the situation was that the teaher allowed students to volunteer to read a poem or prayer at a certain point in the day, but like I said, my memory is hazy. I guess that doesn’t count as forcing prayer if we were invited to read a poem and I chose a religious one.
Throughout high school we had a moment of silence each morning but that’s all.
I remember being shocked when I moved down south and married a high school teacher. One year we went to a faculty holiday party and the school principal said a prayer for everyone before dinner. That was strange enough, but the following year I worked as a substitute teacher and went to an afterschool teacher’s meeting and the principal started off the meeting with a prayer! That’s the South for you.
Yes, every morning in elementary school we had a Bible verse, a prayer, the pledge and a patriotic song. It seems like a lot but it only took about fifteen minutes in all. I can’t imagine anyone even thinking to refuse so I don’t know that we were forced. We just did what we were supposed to do.
This was like the OP, in Memphis in the early eighties.
No forced prayers, but I seem to recall that in high school we had that moment of silence thing Kolga mentions, the unspoken point of which was prayer.
In 8th grade, we had a new principal come in who was an authoritarian and a religious nut. During his tenure, we were actually called into the auditorium for a full-on come-to-Jesus sermon. When I saw what was going on, I and a like-minded buddy of mine walked out the back door. We were immediately collared by a teacher. When we told her we objected to the sermon, she made a disapproving face but took us to spend the duration of the assembly in a classroom.
In high school there was a similar assembly once, but it was “voluntary.” I and several friends were the only ones who opted out, and we spent the time in chemistry lab.
Under PA law, a biblical reading of ten verses of the bible was required. And the pledge. Usually the teacher read the ten verses (always from the old testament) like a laundry list. And we were all supposed to recite the pledge, which I did until they inserted “under god” into it and then I stopped. That happened some time in the early 50s.
A girl I dated a few times told me that in her HS, the students took turns reading from the bible. One tried to read from the Koran and was shot down. I don’t know what I would have done had I been asked to read. Probably just gone along with it. Not worth making a fuss over.
This isn’t exactly the same thing, but I was involuntarily “saved” by my in-school-suspension teacher. I spent a lot of time in ISS in the 11th grade. The guy who supervised it was really an art teacher, and I was an art student. When there were no kids in ISS, he would hang out in the art classroom and he knew and liked me from that. Plus, I always got suspended for things like smoking and cutting class; I wasn’t really a “bad” kid.
So one day when I was the only one in ISS he started talking to me about Jesus and asked me if I was “saved.” Being Catholic, I wasn’t really familiar with the evangelical religions, but I told him I had been both baptized and confirmed. He said it wasn’t the same thing and asked me to pray with him.
Now, Catholics don’t do the “touchy-feely” kind of stuff; everything is formal and ritualized. But I went along with what he was doing even though it made me uncomfortable. So, I was therefore “saved,” and was both kind of touched and really creeped out. Thinking about it now, it’s easy to see how kids will often go along with what an authority figure says, especially one they’re friendly with, even when they know the adult really shouldn’t be doing it.
Yes to prevented from praying. During the farewell dinner for high school seniors in my town there used to be a prayer. By the time I graduated the prayer was not allowed nor were people allowed to have a moment of silence at the beginning of the dinner because some parents had made a huge stink about the traditional prayer when I was in 9th or 10th grade.
(American born, FWIW) - Southern England, boarding school in 1972. During morning assembly, singing hyms and reciting the Lord’s prayer was standard. As were regular Bible study classes and, for boarding school residents, mandatory church every Sunday. It was an extremely strict school - regulation underwear (yes it was checked), Two-minute showers twice a week (timed and checked), two hours a night mandatory silence and homework, etc.
I was 14 and loathed the place, so I decided to pull the Jewish card. I’m technically Jewish; my mother was born a German Jew, Holocaust, whole nine yards, even though as a family we were not observant. But I pulled it anyway, went to all authorities and declared I wanted nothing at all to do with Christianity, wanted to opt out of morning assembly, church, bible classes and so on.
They had no idea what to do with me. I was the first self-identified Jewish person ever in that school. Certainly the first to ever take a stand. So they scrambled, then caved in and I got stuck in empty classrooms with a book by myself whenever anything vaguely religious happened. That was great.
No. I went to public school in Montgomery County, MD, late '90s-early '00s. We had the Pledge of Allegiance (which most of us didn’t bother with) and that was it. The school system was very diverse, with a number of Muslims and Jews (school was closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and there were a lot of students with lawyer parents. I never got a hint of anything religious and I’m sure it would have all hit the fan if there had been something of that nature.
We were led in the Lord’s Prayer each morning—until the 1963 Supreme Court decision. I was in first grade, so I don’t know if this was a choice made by the teacher or the East Texas school.
In sixth grade, a little girl at my school was hit by a car and killed during Open House night. The next day, our teacher said she would like to have a moment of silence for the little girl, and that if we liked we could pray silently. We were all mortified at the very idea of praying at school where everyone could see you.
