There will be a letter from Kurt Sharar in Thursday’s Daily Record, touching on this topic, but I thought I’d chip in a little early.

Sharar’s letter addresses the notion that society is in the toilet because religion has been exorcised from the schools and that in the glory days of the 1940s and 1950s God sat right behind the teacher and everything in the world was jim-dandy. Sharar said he attended school in that era and teachers were not preachers and overt religious instruction would not have been tolerated.

I didn’t attend school in that era, but I did spend time in both the public school and the Catholic school system. The main difference, from my view, was the classroom atmosphere and discipline, not the religious content. One day a student asked my favorite English teacher, a nun, whether we could have a prayer before a test. She said sure, but he’d been much better off studying before the test. That pretty much summed up Catholic school education. It was more demanding than the public school but you were taught rely on strong study habits, not divine intervention.

The only class to regularly include prayer at the start was P.E., and I think most of the boys were praying for something really bad to happen to the P.E. teacher.

We had religion as a required class, but it was not religious indoctrination, it was the study of world religions. They were classes in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and such. And they weren’t titled, “The Evils of Islam.” Learning about other religions is critical to understanding the world in which we live. But it seems like those pounding the Bible for more religion in school want Christian indoctrination. And why they want teachers to perform this service, I’m not sure. Preachers and parents are much better suited to this task.

Look for Sharar’s letter Thursday. It’s a good read.