PUBLIC SCHOOL--WHOSE PRAYER AND WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY? Jack's Shack on School Prayer:

My biggest job in life is to teach my children how to be menschen. It is a parent's obligation to instill values within our children. It is not the school or societies responsibility to teach them how to become good people. It is mine. This is a large part of why I make time for my kids.

I love my children and want them to be happy. So I provide them with structure, with guidance and with a framework that they can apply to life. The primary set of values is what they receive at home. It is nice for that to be supplemented by the school, but a public school shouldn't touch upon religion for all the reasons I mentioned above. There is strength in plurality.

In a parallel vein, in recent times, the public school has been made the guardian for too much. Neil Postman wrote in Teaching As A Conserving Activity:

As Henry Perkinson wrote in The Imperfect Panacea, Americans have not hesitated to use their public schools as instruments to solve the myriad and intractable social and political problems their other institutions have been unable to handle.

...If you heap upon the school all of the problems that the family, the church, the political system and the economy cannot solve, the school becomes a kind of well-financed garbage dump...

Everything in a child's life--including healthy meals and sex ed. has become the responsibility of public schools. It wouldn't hurt for parents to agree to put the responsibility for a child where it ultimately belongs--isn't that part of schepping nachas?

Technorati Tag: Prayer in School and Public Schools and Neil Postman.