Better Schools Aren’t Built on Prayer Alone

By placing Andrea Hecht’s critique of school prayer (“Private Matter of Prayer Just Doesn’t Fit in Public Schools,” Dec. 11) next to Joyce Sunila’s expression about violence and other problems in Valley schools (“Count Parent’s Confidence Among the Fatalities”), The Times did us all a favor by highlighting the key educational question before us: Where should we focus our resources in making schools the foundation for our communities?

If the Radical Right has its way, the answer is in school prayer. But this will lead only to further splintering and divisiveness in our school system and will do nothing to solve the real problems that Sunila addresses.

The American Jewish Congress believes that if we really want to deal with serious educational issues, we should focus our energies on keeping weapons out of the hands of schoolchildren, on improving school infrastructures (Sunila and her neighbors are working hard just to keep the neighborhood school building looking decent), and on improving teacher resources. By making public schools an integral and strong part of our communities, with much to offer children, we will show the next generation what values we truly stand for.

CAROL PLOTKIN

Executive director

American Jewish Congress

Los Angeles

* I think that, since this is the United States of America, the land of the free, students who want to pray should be allowed to do so.

I do not, however, believe that the students who do not want to pray should be ejected from their classrooms while they do it.

So what I propose is this: Let the praying students take their gods, guardian angels, goblins, gremlins, ghosts, devils, witches, sorcerers and magicians and leave the classrooms to go stand in a snow drift someplace while they practice their illusions of superiority, their indifference to reason, and whatever other superstitious nonsense their anxieties and imaginations may conjure.

Meanwhile, the sensible students can simply get on with their education.

DON RICHARDS

Van Nuys