Religion: Religion in Schools

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U.S. schools are much more secular than Britain's. In Britain more than 1,500,000 of the 5,000,000 children aged five to 14 go to church schools (most of the 1,500,000 are Anglican, with 377,000 Roman Catholics). Of America's 20,707,000 schoolchildren, only about 2,200,000 are in church schools, nearly all of them Catholic (though half America's Catholic children go to public instead of parochial schools). To compensate for the almost complete absence of religious teaching in the U.S. public schools, churchmen have plugged for "released time" to let children out of school for an hour a week of instruction in their own churches, but the movement has attained only a small success. For example, in New York City only 70,000 of the 998,679 children in public schools take this time out.