silent_storm said:
Thats the problem now. I might be wrong, but people cant even pray in some schools in America now right? What happened to freedom of religion?
Kids, teachers, etc. can pray all they want. A SCHOOL itself cannot initiate or actively introduce a program of religious prayer or services of any kind because the implied separation of Church and State. The government cannot espouse one religion over another (or those who don't have a religion), thus all government funded institutions cannot established through overt compulsion or subtle implication an official relgious program whatever the denomination. This does not prevent students or faculty from saying prayers or professing their religious affiliations on their own time, in private, singly or in groups. The institution must not be involved.
The real problem with schools, if people really wanted to be serious about fixing these issues, involve a number of major factors:
1) Economics: Since public school funding tends to be tied through municipal property taxes, a disadvantaged town has difficulty coming up with the requisite number of teachers, supplies and facilities to make it worthwhile for the local populace to even attend school. The level of crime often found in poorer regions make for a terrible environment in which a child should grow. Overcrowding is also a symptom. More kids plus fewer teachers equals more acting out.
2) Parental involvement is either cursory due to social factors or curtailed by economic factors (i.e. both parents have to work due to stagnating wages and rising costs of living).
3) Image consciousness and media saturation -- as much as I usually take the side of the freedom of expression, the level of media saturation has reached the recent generations of children at a fevered pitch, and there is no let-up. Kids are pressured more and more to fit certain molds of adequate looks and behavior. Adolescence is stressful to begin with, and the rate at which children are exposed to the violence and negativity of the modern world appears to be having a detrimental effect and causing additional stresses unheard of by earlier generations.
There are more reasons, but these are among the major ones I could think of at the moment. As for a quiet moment of prayer ending violence in schools, that's a load of bunk. I went to a Catholic School for five years in a lower-income, small city, and some of those sorry thugs I went to school with are probably in prison by now. Then I went to a public school (a wealthy one in an expansive suburb) where the vast majority of kids graduated on time (276 out of 284) and went to college. The difference, while anecdotal, can be backed up with empirical research (which also states that school violence, with the exception of the recent tragedies, has been decreasing in recent years).
I think Justice Hugo Black put it best in Engel v. Vitale (1962):
The history of man is inseparable from the history of religion. And perhaps it is not too much to say that since the beginning of that history many people have devoutly believed that "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." It was doubtless largely due to men who believed this that there grew up a sentiment that caused men to leave the cross-currents of officially established state religions and religious persecution in Europe and come to this country filled with the hope that they could find a place in which they could pray when they pleased to the God of their faith in the language they chose. And there were men of this same faith in the power of prayer who led the fight for adoption of our Constitution and also for our Bill of Rights with the very guarantees of religious freedom that forbid the sort of governmental activity which New York has attempted here. These men knew that the First Amendment, which tried to put an end to governmental control of religion and of prayer, was not written to destroy either. They knew rather that it was written to quiet well-justified fears which nearly all of them felt arising out of an awareness that governments of the past had shackled men's tongues to make them speak only the religious thoughts that government wanted them to speak and to pray only to the God that government wanted them to pray to. It is neither sacrilegious nor antireligious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance.
