Public education not patriotic: Don Feder urges patriotic Americans to support school choice initiat

It is remarkable to note how many great Americans cut their teeth on the Bible as young scholars. Lord knows, that can't be allowed in public school.

Do you know this as a fact? Have you spent time in your local public school to see for yourself?

My daughter's public school has a 30 minute end-of-the-day time for reading. They choose what they want to read. My daughter often brings her bible to read and has never had a problem. They also gather before school for morning prayer. And we have found a silver lining, I am a religious education teacher and teach her religious education class after school, she has invited many of her friends from school to join the class, and they have and now some of their families also come to our church. Bringing people to her faith is something she would not have had the opportunity to do in a private religious school setting and she keeps up on her religious studies because kids often ask her questions about her faith and she comes home and looks up the answer or asks me.

I am sure there are some schools with jerks who will give people a hard time, but I think they are few and far between. They finished studying the history of Christianity in her 7th grade public school history class and are studying other religions as well. There are also biblical literature classes at the high school. She gets every bit as much a religious education as a child in private school. There is an abundance of after-school religious education opportunities for every public school child who is interested.

Private schools that are cheaper than public schools often pay low salaries to beginning teachers. And in my area, actually, the newly built private schools cost as much per student and many cost more than the price our public school gets per student in lower elementary/secondary. Especially when you add back in subsidies these schools get from the churches they are affiliated with. And in high school, the private schools cost alot more than the per student cost of public school. Maybe in years past the private schools were cheaper, but with the loss of nuns to teach for nearly free and the cost of building new private schools and stocking them...it can be just as much to educate a privately schooled child as a public school child. Make some calls in your area and see how much it costs. I have noticed big changes in tuitions in just the past few years.

My daughter's public school has a 30 minute end-of-the-day time for reading. They choose what they want to read. My daughter often brings her bible to read and has never had a problem. They also gather before school for morning prayer. And we have found a silver lining, I am a religious education teacher and teach her religious education class after school, she has invited many of her friends from school to join the class, and they have and now some of their families also come to our church.

What country do you live in? I live in PA outside of Philly and have never heard of such things, even when I was in public school back in the 50's and 60's. Strong, strong Republican area too.

Perhaps in very low grades there was a prayer, but by high school it had switched to either a minute of silence or a secular philosophical reading. Of course, we did have a definite Jewish component in the population.

Nowadays, there are Christian schools that are quite popular, and I rather imagine they don't view reading the Bible as something irrelevant to education.

I know the first schools systems in Massachusetts were city based, not state based. I am also sure that that state involvement in MA in the pre Civil War era would have been rather minimal and most likely very free of the modern nonsense. Even then, the primary argument was over the amount of rote learning. I myself am a great fan of it. I have always thought of it as weight lifting for the brain.

Which is why literacy rates topped 98% in Massachusetts in the late 1840's, a level never since reached again (MA was the first state to mandate, by law, government schooling, also in the 1840's).

Just checked back a little. The purpose of the MA schools in those days was to teach every child to read so that they could read the Bible. No kidding. Worked good, didn't it?

Sure did. When there was no penicillin around, when most families lost at least one child in infancy, when many men lost a wife in childbirth and a slight cough could lead to death within days, people were a lot more concerned about their eternal souls than they are now. Learning to read the Bible, at a very young age, was of the upmost importance.