A Medical Excuse from prayer in schools

Psychologists tell us that the area of our brains that assists us in forming ethical choices doesn't begin to aggressively develop until we enter into our pubescent phase. They also tell us that the portions of the brain that evaluates facts as true, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, proves to be inconsistently developed in preadolescent brains.

The problem this presents for the teaching of religion in the schools is that the elementary educational system must, given the nature of the development of the human brain, be devoted to the introduction of and memorization of facts in evidence. You can teach a child that the sum of two twos is four, and you can teach them that in 2008 there were 228 million self-identified Christians reporting on the United States Census versus 9 million members of other religious faiths. You cannot, however, teach them that; there may be a religious trend in America based on the fact that a majority of the American population, reporting to their government, identified themselves as Christian. Our children are simply not physically able to assimilate the subtleties of this observation in a educationally significant and consistent manner.

Perhaps, one of the rights of passage into adulthood is the physical ability to distinguish between what one believes, and why one believes it.

citing:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/religion.html (table 75)

Liu, D., Sabbagh, M., Gehring, W., & Wellman, H. (2009). Neural correlates of children's theory of mind development. Child Development, 80(2), 318-326. Retrieved from MEDLINE with Full Text database.