It took the threat of a lawsuit before the keepers of Sharpe Elementary School agreed that maybe Miss Burns shouldn't ask her students who went to church on Sundays. All we want as children is to be liked and to be like everyone else. The last thing we want is to be different. Knowing how left out and ashamed I felt in Miss Burns' class, I wonder how any school-sanctioned expression of religious belief could not be coercive. We already have absolute freedom of religious expression.
Children can pray in school or anywhere else whenever they so please.
To do so would not be religious freedom, but the worst kind of religious coercion imaginable. It's exactly the kind of thing that so many Americans, especially Christians, came to this country to escape. We only stayed that one school year in Memphis. Dad found a teaching job in Pennsylvania, and we headed North. When Mom came to pick me up the last day of school, Miss Burns was there with my report card and all my class projects.