Public Education VS Gospel Songs

[Vance R Koven]

On Wed, 22 Oct 1997 PureAXI0M at AOL.COM (Tim Mitchell) wrote:

> My child is to sing gospel songs
> in her choir.  The school is a public school.  The class (choir) is being
> taken for a grade, not an extracurricular activity.
> [snip] So my question to all of you is:  Where
> is the wall at today between Church and State? And to what cases are we
> attributing that wall to this location?

Would you be as exercised if your child were singing a Bach cantata (other
than the Coffee Cantata), or Mendelssohn's "Elijah" or Haydn's "Creation"?

An awful lot of the best music written has had a religious theme; that
shouldn't put it off-limits to public school performance. It is, after
all, being performed not for the purpose of preaching but as music.

I'm not aware of any case that prevents public school performances (or
displays, in the case of visual art) of religiously-based works in the
context of classroom work or performance study.

For what it's worth, at Boston (public) Latin School, where one of my sons
attends, the Gospel Choir is one of the leading ensembles.

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