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One morning in Ohio someone brought up the separation of church and state, and the fact that hymns and prayers are now forbidden in public schools, and I agreed with those who felt that any kind of religious proselytizing in a public school is an impertinence—an independent school, obviously, is another question. “But,” I found myself saying, “you will find that you cannot help teaching children your own religion, whatever it is. If you are an atheist, that will be clear to them, even if you think you’re teaching nothing but social studies. If a belief in God motivates your life, the children are going to know that, too, whether you ever mention God or not. If you are more interested in money than anything else, that’s not going to escape them. You’ve got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children. Subjects can probably be better taught by machines than by you. But if we teach our children only by machines, what will we get? Little machines. They need you, you as persons.” And I quoted Emerson: “What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.
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