Prayers and School Performance

Myths About the Separation of Church and State

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Myth:
After prayer was removed from schools, performance has declined and social problems have increased.

Response:
The purpose of the above argument it to try and claim that various social ills like crime, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy are all due to the fact that prayer and Bible reading have been removed. If only they had been kept, so the argument goes, then society would be much better off today. Unfortunately, they weren't - but we should reinstitute them now and save society from future grief.

This argument is nothing more than a logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Regrettably, it is a fallacy which is often committed by many people and in many situations. The nature of this fallacy is to assume that when two events happen around the same time, then one must be the cause of the other. It is for this reason that such a fallacy is often criticized as a failure to properly distinguish between correlation and causation.

To make it easy to see why the above argument is a fallacy, consider another series of momentous legal, political and social events which happened around the same time: Civil Rights and School Integration. How many are willing to argue that the decline in school performance and increase in both school and social ills are due to Civil Rights and School Integration? Not many - but, from a correlative perspective, that is no less valid than attributing our social problems to the elimination of state-mandated school prayer.

The fact of the matter is, our social problems are complex, their origins are complex and their solutions will be complex. Even if the lack of official school prayers contributed anything at all to those problems, it would be invalid and simplistic to focus only on them. As it is, no actual causal connection has been demonstrated by anyone - all people can do is point to a correlation in time and claim, without basis, that this alone justifies a causal relationship.