Show of hands please. Do the students at your school still recite the Pledge of Allegiance? The Pledge went by the board at my school once the principal decided that all morning announcements — not just the Pledge — were a distraction that took away from learning time. On the other hand, she once questioned the 5th grade teachers’ decision to have students sing the Star Spangled Banner at an assembly because, as she put it, “It’s a war song.”
Woodbury, Vermont, popuation 800, is in the midst of a controversy over the Pledge.
The brouhaha in the Vermont school began in September, when parent Ted Tedesco began circulating petitions calling for the return of pledge recitation as a daily practice in the 19th-century schoolhouse, which has 55 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. School officials agreed to resume it as a daily exercise, but not in the classroom.
Starting last week, a sixth grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the pledge, the Burlington Free Press reports.
Tedesco, a retired Marine Corps major, and others aren’t happy about that solution, calling it disruptive and inappropriate because it put young children in the position of having to decide between pre-class play time and leaving the classroom to say the pledge.
“Saying the pledge in the classroom is legal, convenient and traditional,” Tedesco said. “Asking kindergarten through sixth-graders who want to say the pledge to leave their classrooms to do so is neither convenient nor traditional.” School board members defend the practice saying it restored the pledge to the school as requested, while preserving the rights of students who — for political or religious reasons — didn’t want to participate.
A few months ago I attended a reunion banquet for a tiny, rural high school that closed shop during the consolidation efforts of the 1950s. Their meeting included the Pledge of Allegiance. When the Pledge came up in the agenda, all of the ~100 in attendance rose – and some with great difficulty, as they were in their 80s and 90s – to recite it.
A month ago I was a bit embarrassed that my DD was the only child at her 4-H meeting who did not know the words to the pledge.
As part of our homeschool morning opening we sing “America the Beautiful”, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” but I’d never bothered with the pledge. It’s not that I have anything against saying it- there just are any number of other patriotic recitations that would be higher on my list for things I’d want my DD to have memorized. Things like the preamble to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and 2nd inaugural address, etc. All of these have a greater historical significance than the pledge, which I understand was written for some magazine’s Columbus Day contest.
But I didn’t want us to be perceived as “those weird, unpatriotic homeschoolers” so I taught her the pledge. When we have the next 4-H meeting tonight, she should be able to say it along with the rest of the kids.
Am I naive? I’ve never equated homeschooling with a lack of patriotism. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I always found it entertaining, while reviewing for the NYS social studies test, to ask my 5th graders to write down, word for word, the pledge that they had recited for years. It was the rare kid who could do so. But a line-by-line analysis of the pledge always made for interesting discussion as they — for the first time, usually — grappled with exactly what they were promising each morning.
By tradition we start all school board meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance, but in elementary schools it seems to be a “teachers discretion” thing and I don’t think any of my daughter’s teachers did it, and I don’t think it’s built into the middle school or high school day.
I was worried that the fact my DD had not known the words to the pledge would be interpreted as unpatriotic. The other 4-H’ers have no way of knowing that I’d simply chosen a different way of showing pride in our country (singing patriotic hymns).
I don’t think one can generalize about the relative patriotism of families who homeschool, however. Teaching patriotism is one of those issues that comes up frequently as a topic of discussion on the homeschooling e-mail lists and BBS in which I participate- and it never fails to elicit strong opinions pro and con.