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Personally, I don't think the question here is whether or not prayer should be allowed in school. I believe the problem is WHAT KIND of prayer is allowed. This is where the argument comes in.
If you are in the hall between classes at your locker, with your eyes closed praying to your "God", you are in your own right. No one has said otherwise. The problem lies in when ALL are expected to pray and to only one "God". We are all different; be it our looks, our backgrounds, our ethnicities, not to mention our religions. All the disagreements I have heard, center around whether or not it is right to make time in the day where all are expected to pay homage to their Deity.

Within nearly any public school system, there are undoubtedly MANY religious backgrounds in the general population. If you allowed time for the Christians to pray before classes, it would only be fair for the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Catholics (and others) to pray as well. I'm guessing that if you allowed every group the time for a prayer session, there wouldn't be time for actual public school curriculum to be taught.
I worry that some parents (especially those who push these issues) are taking advantage of the public school system. Their children are already gone for eight or more hours a day, and they figure if they can teach them religion or spirituality also, the parents have even less to worry about when they get home from school.
As for prayer in private schools, it seems to me that most private schools are based on the premise of one organized religion or another to begin with. If you are able to pay out that kind of money to place your child in such a school, I'd like to think they'd be put in a religious set-up you are comfortable with. Why is the teaching of religion or prayer even an issue in an instance such as this?
Religion is as personal as any other difference we we are taught to politely ignore; such as handicaps or heights and weights. I don't quite understand why a select few should be allowed to broadcast their beliefs and complain when they don't get things thier way- Nor do I understand why they would want to.

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