Without a Prayer

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Reframes religion's role in twentieth-century American public education The processes of secularization and desegregation were among the two most radical transformations of the American public school system in all its history. Many regard the 1962 and 1963 US Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible-reading as the end of religion in public schools. Likewise, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case is seen as the dawn of school racial equality. Yet, these two major twentieth-century American educational movements are often perceived as having no bearing on one another. Without a Prayer redefines secularization and desegregation as intrinsically linked. Using New York City as a window into a national story, the volume argues that these rulings failed to successfully remove religion from public schools, because it was worked into the foundation of the public education structure, especially how public schools treated race and moral formation. Moreover, even public schools that were not legally segregated nonetheless remained racially segregated in part because public schools rooted moral lessons in an invented tradition—Judeo-Christianity—and in whiteness. The book illum

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