The statement above seems to imply that if we could just go back to a time when there was the perfunctory prayer in the morning that somehow socialist-entitlement government schooling could be fixed. It can't because government socialist-entitlment schooling was flawed from the beginning and it was inevitable that it ended up as it is now.
At their very best, modern government schools began ( mid-1800s to early 1900s) with a lukewarm and generic Protestantism. What does Christ do with the lukewarm? He spits them out of His mouth! What do children risk by attending schools with lukewarm and generic religion? Answer: They risk learning to be comfortable with being lukewarm and generic about religion.
By my grandmother's day, ( born 1894), the government schools were godlessly secular in their worldview with a nod to God in the morning. Do you think God might have been offended? Children who attend these schools risk learning to merely nod to God on occasion.
Today,....Government schools are utterly godless. Just to cooperate in the classroom the child must think and reason godlessly. How could it be otherwise? How can this be religiously neutral? ( It isn't!)
I have a set of the McGuffey Readers that were used until Dewey. Even though those books kept being revised and taking more Biblical texts out and making it more and more secular during the 19th century—even the books printed in 1920 had lots of Bible verses and all the stories were moral stories based on Biblical morality.
True-—it wasn’t as much Christian as in the beginning but it had God and Lord throughout the book and Right and Wrong (Moral Absolutes) were taught-— the standard from the Ten Commandments (not barney frank).
That is why there was a moral compass in the US and not in Germany during the 30’s—We returned to the pews, they didn’t—they turned to a new god, Hitler. They had adopted the postmodernist—(moral relativism/atheism) was established there earlier since the philosophy was founded there—Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte-—it was the heart of the atheist movement and took awhile to infiltrate our schools. Since we were not like Germany-—with centralized public schools it took much longer to infiltrate all the small country schools and towns in all the states. That is why the Bible belt was not in the major cities-—those infiltrated first. Jimmy Carter-—forming the DOE completely destroyed all public education. But Dewey took out the word God and Bible verses etc. But lots of small schools never ever got the “new” curricula for decades. That is why the atheist movement took longer here-—we didn’t get the Centralized Prussian school system finalized until Jimmy Carter. We are one generation behind the immoral Europe.