Education: Schooltime Religion

Instead of playing outdoors or roughhousing in the halls during their lunchtime recess, almost half of the 280 pupils at Michigan's Bangor High School were munching their apples and sandwiches in seven classrooms. They were getting religious instruction in a U.S. public school, and thus stirring up a statewide controversy over the oft-debated provision in the U.S. Constitution prescribing separation of church and state.*

Originator of the weekly lunchtime sessions is Bangor's mild-mannered School Superintendent Homer Hendricks, 40, a Methodist. After hearing a talk by a local Roman Catholic priest stressing the need for...