The issue of what is and is not permissible religious expression in public schools in the United States tends, unfortunately, to gravitate to the extremes. On the one hand are public schools, typically in the South, who want to prominently display religious texts such as the Ten Commandments in schools. On the other hand are public schools, typically in more Northern urban areas, who try to suppress even the most incidental religious expression of students.
The Associated Press reports about a Syracuse, New York school that wasn’t too pleased with a drawing produced by a kindergartner. The student was supposed to make a poster about the environment to be posted as part of a student display. The student ended up initially drawing a picture of Jesus praying with the message that “Prayer changes things.”
The school said that poster hadn’t fulfilled the assignment, so the boy drew a second poster which,
…included a church and showed two children picking up garbage from the lawn and putting it in trash cans, a man and a woman dropping trash into a recycling bin and a picture of a globe with cutout children holding hands circling it.
Off to one side was a man in a flowing robe kneeling down with both hands outstretched to the clouds above. He was not identified as Jesus.
The school displayed that poster, but only after folding it in half so the Jesus-looking character was not visible. The student’s parents are suing, and if the teachers and administrators altered the sign specifically to hide the Jesus figure because of its religious implications, they were pretty clearly acting unconstitutionally.
Anyway, I find it odd that adults who children look up to engage in this sort of behavior. As some of you know, I’m an atheist and my wife is a Wiccan, and we take our daughter to a day care center that is on the campus of the university we work at — the day care is owned by the university and is therefore a public institution.
Over the summer they had the children create various posters and they hung them on the wall so that any visitor would see them coming in. One child, probably from a Christian family, had created a poster that exhorted the reader to reject Satan, accompanied by relatively technically accomplished depictions of both Satan and the benefits to be had by not following him.
If one of the teachers had drawn such an overtly religious poster, that would have concerned both of us given their position of authority, but the child’s poster was not a concern. On the one hand we’d prefer not to have our daughter indoctrinated by staff members, but on the other hand shielding her completely from any religious views that students have would be equally absurd.