But all of these are prayers - petitions and hopes, doubts and praise. If I were to tell you what to do with your silence a number of you would resent the heck out of it. There is too much room for that in the public schools. Prayer is a voluntary act, as the church is a voluntary organization. School is not a voluntary organization.
Kids have to attend.
The best way to diminish a child's desire for a relationship with God is to force one upon them. In the environment of the school, it will feel like an assignment rather than a natural awareness of the soul. It is this kind of spiritual control that drives kids to claim atheism before they have even come to a conscious awareness of God. It complicates the conversation. Those who wrote the Constitution were trying to ensure that no government here would establish religion for the people, as it had done so controllingly in England and other European countries.