The Enduring Problem of Religion and the Public Schools No other educational issue hits a more sensitive nerve with the American public than the role of religion in the public schools. This is the issue that causes parents to storm school board meetings and science teachers to duck and cover. It's the issue that keeps newspaper editors busy all day and school administrators awake all night-the one stoking the public fire, the other trying to figure out what to say to a group of parents who

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... d that the upcoming graduation ceremonies be opened in prayer. We shouldn't be surprised that such issues evoke strong responses from people involved directly and indirectly with the public schools. The public schools have always been a public arena where people with vastly different political, moral, and religious ideas and understandings send their children for assistance with a task that could not be more precious or dear to them-the education of their children. Parents and other community members contend with one another and with those responsible for educating their children so insistently about the presence of religious ideas and activities in the public schools because something vital is at stake-the moral (and, perhaps, spiritual) development of their children, at least part of which happens in the public schools. Parents think and wonder almost continuously during the years they are raising their children about the kind of persons their children will become and the kind of life each will lead. "Will my child be happy in the living of his or her life?" is always a first question they ask themselves , and so, too, "Will my child be healthy?" These are not usually questions that generate much controversy. We have a generally clear idea of what we mean by "health," and we only disagree about what it means to be "happy" if we start to think about it too much. As long as we mean by "happy" the feeling that exists when one is relatively free from pain or anxiety or when a reasonable state of well-being is maintained-and as long as we agree that each of us has an unencumbered right to pursue what it is we believe will make us happy-then there is not much about which to argue. It's when we ask the third important question natural to all parents in thinking about their children that the trouble starts. The third question is "Will my child be a good person?" Like the other two, this third question has a correlate question: "How do I help my child become a good person?" It may be, in a certain sense, that this question is like the one about happiness-as long as we don't think about what we mean by a "good person" very hard we can all agree. If by being "good" we have in mind only a sort of low-level civic responsibility-basic law abidingness