Have you heard that the Good Old Days were perfect?  Nothing bad ever happened back then. People respected others and all was peaceful.

Newsflash!  The Good Old Days never happened.  I’ve had this discussion with many people who claimed they did and while I have respect for them and their experience, I protest.  It’s normal to only remember the pleasant things.   We must, however, not make the mistake of making only our good memories historical fact.

The other night we attended a wonderful Christmas Concert for the middle school.  We paused at the beginning with a moment of silence for the victims of  Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook.  The principle, who is a nice guy and cares about the kids in his charge, said that this happened because we took God out of our schools.  Most of the crowd clapped for him.  I did not clap. I may have irreverently rolled my eyes actually.  Not out of disrespect for him, but at the fallacy that kids saying a generic prayer everyday at school was going to make sure that a shooter would not make it in the school building. The Good Old Days of school prayer were not perfect and I wish people would remember that.

I must disclose that I am a Christian. I pray. I teach my kids to pray. I have a prayer I say every day when my kids go off to school that includes a plea to bring them home safely to me. I am also happy that my kids can pray at school. Yes, they can pray at school. They can pray silently, they can pray out loud. They can hold a Bible study before and after school. They can say a prayer at an event or graduation.  Student-led prayer is allowed.  Government-led prayer is not allowed.

Back to the Good Old Days.  In 1962 schools stopped school-sanctioned prayer.  Let’s look at a few things that were going on during the years we had school prayer:

Up until 1954 it was legal schools to racially segregate schools.   Two of my  children would have had to go to different schools than my other two children, not because of age, but because of skin color.  Those same two children wouldn’t have been allowed to be adopted by us at that time because of race.  Those same two children would have had to use the back door and a different bathroom and water fountain in parts of this country.  This did not please God, I am sure of that.

What happened when high school girls became pregnant?  They were socially stigmatized (unlike the boys who fathered the babes in most circumstances), sent away to be coerced in surrendering their babies to closed adoption, urged to never think about their babies, or forced to marry the father even if it wasn’t the best situation for them.  This did not please God. I am sure of that.

Were there drug abusers in our schools back then? Yes.  Did kids participate in underage drinking back then? Yes. Was there inequality between the sexes back then? Yes.   Until the 60′s my girls would not have school sports to join.  Where there bullies back then?  Yes. Where there ineffective teachers back then? Yes.  Did all kids have the same opportunity to go to college back then? No.  Hmmmm. All of these things were happening with prayer in schools.  We just didn’t acknowledge it as a society or we had the old boys will be boys attitude that wasn’t so helpful if you were a girl.

There has always been psychologically imbalanced people who harm others. There has always been that evil in the world.  What has changed is not that prayer was taken out of schools but technology.  We now know of all the bad things that happen as soon as they happen, it is in our faces constantly on the TV, in our phones and on our computers.  We have a larger population which leads to more people who do horrific acts.   We glorify violence in our entertainment as humans always have, but now have hand held machines with amazing graphics to play out our pretend violence.  We have newer modes of acting out.  We have guns that we didn’t have 50 years ago because of advances in technology.  Technology, like all things, can be used in good and bad ways.  The gun that protects our country also can also kill our country’s children. The TV that tells us to prepare for a bad storm, can also spew propaganda and trashy tabloid news.

I will not go into the discussion of how we can prevent another Sandy Hook in this post.  I will not talk about mental health care or  first and second amendment issues.  I feel one brewing, but right now I just want to provoke people to think passed the  rhetoric of school prayer’s removal being the cause of all bad things that now happen in the United States.  Our nation is not perfect now, just as it wasn’t then.  We must push through this wave of whimsy of the Good Old Days and Prayer in Schools and come up with real solutions.

*Update: Blogher.com has featured this post!