>>Being a kid who grew up in public schools when it was still legal to to pray (although I wasn't a Christian then - in fact, the science classes taught me to be an athiest), I don't remember anyone being forced to pray. How can they do that, anyway? Can anyone make you *think* a prayer? And, I don't recall any group recitals in classes, except for our national pledge each morning.
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>Maybe it wasn't the custom where you went to school, but large numbers of schools (it's probably safe to say most) used to start their day with the Lord's Prayer before the Supreme Court decision. In fact, it's my impression that even afterward, that was pretty common in large parts of the country. My husband, who's a couple of years older than I am and went to an elementary school that was well above 50% Jewish (his 6th grade class was 34 Jews and a gentile), remembers this from his early days.

I grew up in Englewood, Colorado. The only schools that I knew to start the day with prayer were Catholic.

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>While individual students may not have been forced to actually recite the prayer, I imagine that in many places, the pressure on them to do so was significant.

Ah, 'pressure', a somewhat less measureable mental property. Sort of like 'feelings' or 'self-esteme'. Hard to measure, but vicious when applied as a standard for behavior control, as our currently poltically correct society now attests.