Adam Laats: The Real Wall of Separation in Public Schools

Adam Laats teaches in the Graduate School of Education at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y., where he is an assistant professor of history and director of the university’s Center for the Teaching of American History.

Voters in Missouri recently approved — by overwhelming margins — a constitutional amendment guaranteeing students’ rights to pray quietly in public schools. But Missouri’s amendment does more than that. Missouri now joins New Hampshire in erecting a new and potentially devastating wall of separation in public schools. 

The new rules represent an effort by activists to throw up barricades around the minds of individual students. Meanwhile, they redirect resources that could be spent on education to fund lawsuits, bankroll public face-offs and support activist groups and political campaigns.

Students can’t learn this way. Schools can’t work this way.   

Missouri’s constitution will include two new rights. Students will be able to “express their beliefs about religion in written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their work.” And no Missouri student will be “compelled” to take part in any “academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs.”...