I am writing in praise of Tanya Dutta's piece about prayer in public schools ("Keep Out of Our Schools," Opinion, Sept. 19). Her clearly written and well though-out arguments actually helped me to crystallize how I feel about the topic.

As a child of an atheist and a lapsed Catholic, I was raised without specific ideas about God and prayer. I elected to join the Unitarian Church with my parents because no one there told me what I ought to think and supported me in my efforts to to a spiritual understanding of my own.

Shortly after joining this church, I went away to summer camp. We all said grace together in the dining hall, but I decided that I didn't want to say grace. When this was brought up with the camp administrators, they asked me to bow my head and observe a "moment of silence" while everyone else prayed. Even at the age of 11, 1 understood that this was wrong. While I didn't know the term "hypocrisy," I still refused to look like I was praying, simply for appearance's sake.

The camp administrators didn't like me much, and as the adults frowned on my determination to keep my eyes open and my head up during grace, the other children realized that I was doing something "wrong." The ridicule and teasing I took for the rest of the week only helped me to reinforce my own agnosticism, but it made my camp experience an incredibly miserable one.

If, in such a situation for only a week, I was so deeply affected by it, what about the children who will go through their whole careers forced to observe this hypocritical moment of silence.

Contrary to Mr. Gingrich's opinion, it is bad to have "pressure to pray." Violating the religious freedoms of even the tiny minority of atheist or agnostic students only shows all the children that freedom of religion is a relative thing. The students whose rights are being stepped on will learn that their rights are not as important as the rights of those who have mainstream beliefs, and will come to feel like second-class citizens. The students whose beliefs are mainstream will come to see that they need not respect different beliefs. These are not the lessons that our schools should teach.

Thank you for Ms. Dutta's fine editorial. I can only hope that the government sees how wrong it is. Nancy Sims '97