Ignorant School Admins Relent on Pledge
Here’s another example of school administrators being completely ignorant of the law even when it’s been established for decades. A school in New Jersey repeatedly punished a student for not standing or reciting the pledge of allegiance, but now that they’ve been shown that they were violating the law, they’ve backed down.
Chelsea Stanton, a high school student in New Jersey, who has repeatedly been punished for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, has finally won her battle, the Cherry Hill Courier Post reports.
Stanton, a senior and atheist at Collingswood High School, says she objects to the words “one nation under God,” which appear in the pledge.
“I couldn’t bring myself to recite it anymore, because I felt like it didn’t respect me,” Stanton told CBS Philly. “I don’t think any student anywhere should have to stand up for this.”
According to the Cherry Hill Courier Post, she has been sent to administrative offices twice this year for violating the school code of conduct, which requires students to stand for the pledge even if they remain silent.
Yet after doing some research, Stanton found that the law was on her side, not the school’s. A state provision requiring students to stand was held unconstitutional by the United States Court of Appeals in 1978, but was never revised to reflect the ruling, CBS Philly reports.
And the original Supreme Court ruling on this goes all the way back to 1942. Back in the mid-90s, the Clinton administration sent a guidance to all public schools in the country telling them what the law requires on issues like this; far too many school administrators apparently didn’t bother to read it.
Doug Little:
June 12th, 2012 at 11:50 am
Sounds very authoritarian to me. I have Pink Floyd’s The Wall playing in my head now.
macallan:
June 12th, 2012 at 11:56 am
Indeed.
Nationalistic rituals like this creep me the hell out.
tacitus:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
It would be interesting to know which other nations require their children to recite a pledge every day. I doubt the list will be very flattering to the USA.
Larry:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Nothing instills a love of country more than a forced recitation of a poem. While standing, no less.
illdoittomorrow:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:17 pm
“I couldn’t bring myself to recite it anymore, because I felt like it didn’t respect me,” Stanton told CBS Philly.
Watch the wingnuts lose their marbles* over this. You don’t want to recite it because it doesn’t respect YOU??!!!11 Why do you hate America so much???
*insofar as they have any left, I mean.
The Lorax:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
And most students just do this because it’s rote. If the teacher said, “The school and country ask you to do this, but you are not, by law, required to, and there will be no penalties whatsoever for ignoring the Pledge completely,” then I’ll bet you not a single student (save, perhaps, for the absurdly patriotic) could be bothered to get up out of her or his chair and recite anything.
The Pledge would go away very quickly if students knew their rights.
tacitus:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
This photo of American school children reciting the pledge back in 1942 will creep you out even more.
I didn’t know this until today, but between 1892 and 1942, they used the “Bellamy salute” when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Naturally, they abolished what had become an overt symbol of fascist power, but it certainly casts the recitation in a different light when all you change is the hand gesture, doesn’t it?
Abby Normal:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:37 pm
Lorax, my experinces tell me otherwise. I started refusing to say the pledge fairly early on in elementry school. The teachers and administration initially tried to force me. But I stood my ground and they eventually relented. At the start of each school year I’d get a new teacher and we’d go through the dance again. The other students saw me win those fights. They saw me for the rest of the year sit through the pledge, or stand, or go out in the hall, or whatever arrangement we came to that year. They knew they could join me any time. Yet not one student ever chose to do so.
d cwilson:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:43 pm
But how will we be able to separate the pinko commie traitors from the Real Americans(tm) if we don’t force everyone to engage in ritualistic displays of fealty?
F:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
The pledge completely freaked me the first day of kindergarten. I always expected religious-flavored ritual to stay in churches.
It was years later when I first became aware of the concepts of loyalty oaths and tests. The light went on in the easy-bake oven of my mind, and the creepitude solidified into something I could stand back and look at and recognize as a whole.
dingojack:
June 12th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
tacitus – surely the modern version of The Pledge of Allegiance isn’t in the original German and dispenses with traditional ‘zeig heil’ x 2 at the end?
Dingo
—–
Although the pledge did used to finish with ‘One people, one nation, one flag’ or some such.
dingojack:
June 12th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Oopps first link.
Dingo
cottonnero:
June 12th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
The older I get, the prouder I am of my fourth grade self for refusing to say the pledge.
We basically never said the pledge in school. I think we learned it in second grade as part of the curriculum, said it a few times, and dropped it completely within a week.
In fourth grade we had a sub who had been a full-time teacher there in the seventies (this was in 1989, if my math is right) and she (I assume because the school still did it daily when she was teaching full time) had us recite the pledge, and asked me, Teacher’s Pet Extraordinaire, to lead the class in the recitation. I balked. I couldn’t explain why, but I refused. She, to her credit, allowed me to sit down, and lead the rest of the class in the pledge herself. When she subbed the next day, she skipped the pledge part, and that was the end of it.
A few years later, I was able to figure out why I balked: the Pledge of Allegiance was in the form of a promise, that much I understood, but I didn’t know exactly what I was promising or what would happen if I failed to live up to it. (I felt the same way about communion at church, and stopped taking it as soon as I could.)
I’m lucky; I went to a school (and a church) that didn’t have much invested in the culture wars, and they not only said I had the option to opt out, but they meant it when they said that. Others went to schools where the bullies enforced conformity.
dingojack:
June 12th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
The (approximate) text for post #12:
“Ich gelobe Treue zur Flagge der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, und für die Republik, für die sie steht, eine Nation unter Gott, unteilbar, mit Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit für alle *.
Eine Flagge, ein Volk, eine Vaterland.
Seig Heil. Seig Heil Seig Heil!!”
——
* Einige Bedingungen und Einschränkungen gelten, gehen Sie auf Ihr lokales Büro für Staatssicherheit für weitere Informationen.
Doug Little:
June 12th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Wunderbar… Dingo.
Synfandel:
June 12th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
When I was in elementary school in the early 70′s in Ontario, we were taught a pledge of allegiance to Canada and to the queen, ending with “…God being my helper” just to get a little religious twist in. After a couple of practice recitations to see if we’d memorized it as required, the whole pledge was dropped. It wasn’t a mandatory daily ritual and I don’t think the teachers in their miniskirts and platform boots were thrilled with the whole thing to begin with.
We were, however, expected to sing the national anthem, ‘O Canada’, say a standard prayer, and sit through a brief Bible reading. These were mandatory parts of the curriculum. The teachers had no choice regardless of how they might have felt about it.
Having recognized at about the age of three or so that God, Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy were all fictitious, resenting anyone ordering me to promise to obey a stranger, and even at that early age finding national anthems disturbing, I refused to sing or pray and just sat quietly through the Bible readings. I wasn’t disruptive; I just opted out. The teachers never made any fuss about it. I suspect they would have been happier if they weren’t required to conduct these indoctrinations and couldn’t be bothered to enforce them.
I was occasionally asked by a classmate why I didn’t sing and pray along and I tried in my child-like way to explain why, but I wasn’t entirely clear on it myself at that point. I just knew that it felt wrong. The classmate was usually just concerned that I would “get in trouble” by not conforming. I wish. Back then, getting in trouble for not conforming was one of the most fun parts of an otherwise boring school life.
ronstrong:
June 12th, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Nothing says “FREEDOM!” like a mandatory morning loyaty oath.
tacitus:
June 12th, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Yeah, that’s a little different though. I grew up in the UK and was required (unless the parents objected) to attend a daily assembly complete with prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, a hymn, Bible reading, and ending blessing, almost every single day of my school career. Nothing at all that could be considered “patriotic” though.
It was a mind-numbing exercise in futility which I have very little doubt explains why the vast majority of churches in the UK are almost totally devoid of young people these days.
I guess the national anthem could be considered along the same lines as a pledge, although I’d be willing to bet that once the religious portion of the daily ritual is abandoned, so will the daily singing of the national anthem.
tacitus:
June 12th, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Perhaps conservatives should put their money where their mouth is and start passing legislation requiring all employees at American companies and places of business to start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. After all, they keep complaining about how unamerican so many citizens are these days, and if the Pledge is such a useful tool in reminding people of their national allegiance, then that would be an easy fix to the problem, right?
Doug Little:
June 12th, 2012 at 4:40 pm
tacitus @19,
Only if it can be recited in Spanish.
d cwilson:
June 12th, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Or Chinese.
macallan:
June 13th, 2012 at 1:32 am
I grew up in eastern Germany during the 80s, they made some half-assed attempts on something like that but nobody, not even school staff, took it seriously and it wasn’t exactly frequent ( like, once a year maybe ) anyway. Of course, YMMV, things were probably different in other parts of the country or a decade or two earlier.
Absolutely, see above.