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Schools are mostly just behavioral adjustment centers where children are indoctrinated into mindlessly taking orders from arbitrary authority figures for arbitrary reasons. Basically, the child’s will is to be broken.
The “education” they receive is simply more indoctrination, imbuing them with patriotism nationalism, and the dominant conception of the world in vogue among the power-elites at that particular point and time.

I still want to be a teacher though.

If this happened here, the right wing Christians would be up in arms, screaming separation of church and state, the teacher would be fired, she’d probably be taken into custody and interrogated to find out whether or not she’s a terrorist, and her family wouldn’t see her again for the next 5 years, or ever again.

And then things would get a whole lot worse.
Christianity would be declared by law, to be THE national religion, people would still be free to attend the church of their choosing, but all public schools would be doing forced bible teachings, students and teachers alike would be punished for refusing to take part, and on and on.
It would get very bad very quickly if that happened here.

Ummm… I know folks are sensitive to the whole separation of church and state thing given the current Bush administration, but does anyone else here think this prediction is just a little over-the-top paranoid?

At any rate, stuff like this has happened here and, lo and behold, the sky hasn’t fallen. In fact, it happened to me in my Jr High Geography class over 16 years ago. The teacher was covering Indian religions and had the whole class practice Buddhist meditation. While these days I wouldn’t have any problem with that at all, at the time it was a major challenge to my faith, the equivalent of being asked to pray to a different god. I chose not to make a big deal about it, just sat there silently with my legs crossed but my eyes open while the rest of the class chanted, and as far as I know no one else in the class made a big deal about it either, despite being in a small rural school in the heart of the conservative Midwest.

While I don’t doubt that there is some kernal of truth to this, I would say that the newspaper blew it all out of proportion.

If this happened here, the right wing Christians would be up in arms, screaming separation of church and state, the teacher would be fired, she’d probably be taken into custody and interrogated to find out whether or not she’s a terrorist, and her family wouldn’t see her again for the next 5 years, or ever again.

And then things would get a whole lot worse.
Christianity would be declared by law, to be THE national religion, people would still be free to attend the church of their choosing, but all public schools would be doing forced bible teachings, students and teachers alike would be punished for refusing to take part, and on and on.
It would get very bad very quickly if that happened here.

The punishment is harsh and nonsensical, it’s about conflicting with the will of the almighty teacher bitch. In the end you can’t really force anyone to learn, that’s not an effective strategy at all. This is about teaching children to obey authority.

Maybe the teacher was giving a demonstration of how religions often use coercion and social pressure to indoctrinate and retain their members? …Nah.

Does the course of study include minor religions like Voodoo? “We are now going to sacrifice the goat and perform the blood ritual Everyone must participate or there will be no cookies and punch for anyone.”

So when I read about this incident, I wonder if it was really some dogmatic fundie teacher forcing all the kids to actually pray in class, or if it was something like what I’ve experienced, a really cool teacher trying to get kids to learn through hands-on activities. Do I think that learning how Muslims pray by actually going through the motions is a bad thing? No. I see the educational value of that.

However, if refusing to pray was the ONLY reason those two kids got a detention, that’s going way beyond acceptable teacher behaviour. However, these are kids we’re talking about. I remember being a kid myself. I know that when I got in trouble at school, the first thing I would do is spin the events so that I came off as a totally innocent victim. Were the kids being obnoxious? Were they being smart-allecks? Were they heckling the kids who were willing to participate? I haven’t heard anything about HOW the kids refused, which suggests to me that if we heard that portion of the story, it would make the teacher’s punishment seem a little more reasonable.

I’m not siding with the teacher. I’m just saying that I would like to hear more about what actually happened before I jump on the “prayer in school? What the flux???!??!?!?” bandwagon.