It is sad, indeed. At six years of age in the late summer of 1960 I started attending first grade. Each morning began with us standing by our desk; the teacher said a prayer; we placed our right hands over our hearts and said the Pledge of Allegiance; and we sang "America the Beautiful," or something similar. The teacher taught us these songs and the pledge by rote, because most of us knew only the words we learned from the Alice and Jerry reading primer.

Those practices are looked down on now. Yet, on the whole, they turned out better citizens than the schools produce in the current age.