School prayer

However, a recent BBC radio study shows that 64% of children (out of 500) do not attend or participate in daily acts of worship or prayer.

In fact, a 2011 survey conducted by BBC found that 60% of parents (out of the 1,743 questioned) believed that the legislation that requires group worship should not be enforced at all.

The Constitutional basis for this prohibition is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which requires that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...The first part of the amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") is known as the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, while the second part ("or prohibiting the free exercise thereof") is known as the Free Exercise Clause.

Although each of these clauses originally applied only to the central US government, the Fourteenth Amendment extended the scope of the entire First Amendment to all levels of government, including the state and local levels,[7] thus compelling states and their public schools to adopt an equally detached approach to religion in schools.

The reading of the passage of Scripture shall be followed by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, but otherwise the schools shall be conducted on strictly secular and non-sectarian principles.

1948, c.42, s.167 The compulsory nature of the Bible reading and prayer recitation was slightly modified by regulations drawn up by the Council of Public Instruction.

Sixteen years later in 1996, based on precedent that would be established in Ontario (1989), required recitation of the Lord’s Prayer as outlined in the Public Schools Act would be held to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

[10] Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board of Education (Director) The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the use of the Lord’s Prayer in opening exercises in public schools offended the Charter s. 2(a).

The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the regulation infringed religious freedom because schools could use only the Lord's Prayer rather than a more inclusive approach.

The judges described as insensitive the position of the respondents that it was beneficial for the minority children to confront the fact of their difference from the majority.

With the unfavorable court decision, the requirement for Christian morning exercises was replaced with the following clauses found in the School Act (1996) in British Columbia.

[14] The issue of school prayer remains contentious even where courts as diverse as those in Canada, the United States, Russia, and Poland attempt to strike a balance between religious and secular activity in state-sponsored arenas.

[17] On the opposing side, others have argued that prayer has no place in a classroom where impressionable students are continually subject to influence by the majority.

[10] The latter view holds that, to the extent that a public school itself promotes the majority religion, the state is guilty of coercive interference in the lives of the individual.