The Pledge of Allegiance and Indoctrination

 

Why do we say the Pledge of Allegiance before public meetings in our town?

Mad Dog surely does not know, but he thinks it may have something to do with the reason we sing the national anthem before sports events: We are about to witness a contest, a conflict between different tribes, and singing the same song all together beforehand reassures us the fabric of what unites us is stronger than what is about to tear us asunder.

 You may scream for the Seahawks or the Yankees, and Mad Dog may root for the Patriots (ahem) and the Red Sox, but we have, as Obama pointed out in his most famous speech, more which unites us than that which divides us.

It's a cohesion ritual.

Mad Dog would be happier if we simply did not pledge allegiance to a flag, an inanimate idol which symbolizes an idea.

Mad Dog's wife is the daughter of a major general in the United States army. He was of "flag rank" which meant he could bring his two star flag to any ceremony or occasion he wished, and, in fact, when he arrived at his daughter's wedding which took place at the Naval station in Newport, R.I., he kicked himself that he had forgotten his flag, which he could have displayed in the front of the Navy chapel where the ceremony took place, along with all the dozens of other flags displayed there.

Mad Dog's wife was happy he had forgotten that flag. She has never permitted a flag to be flown on Mad Dog's house, despite Mad Dog's love for design and some flags are really wonderfully designed. "Flags divide people," she said. "That's the point of flags." She is a child of the 70's. 

Her father had to be called out of a meeting at the Pentagon because his daughter had been arrested. She had chained herself to a chain linked fence, along with the President of Mt. Holyoke College, protesting the war in Vietnam.

"I raised three sons and one daughter," her father told Mad Dog. "The three of them, in aggregate, never caused me half the trouble that one daughter did."

So no flags at Mad Dog's.

But what about that pledge, that ceremony of unity?

The "under God" phrase got added in 1954 at the height of the cold war against "godless communism," along with the "In God We Trust" motto which had been on coins since the Civil war but got expanded use during the cold war.

That motto, "In God We Trust," was derived from a visit by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase after his visit to Brown University, where he noted the Latin phrase, "In Deo Speramus," which was part of the university's seal, appearing on libraries and various gates on campus, so Chase added it to coins to suggest God was on the Union side in 1864.

Patriot

Mad Dog's reservations about The Pledge are not so much about its phrasing, (apart from the violation of Church/State) but about easy patriotism.

As far as Mad Dog is concerned anything which is easy, is not patriotism.

Patriotism must involve risk or sacrifice or  work to be real.  Wearing an American flag lapel pin is too easy. It's a phony patriotism. Saying a pledge is too easy. 

Paying your taxes, not easy: Patriotism. Going off to war, definitely not easy: Patriotism. Demonstrating to stop the Vietnam war: Patriotism. Holding up a sign on a street corner against ICE: Patriotism. Voting to support the First Amendment on a School Board: Patriotism.

"We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately," Ben Franklin said. 

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were actual Patriots. They pledged their lives and their fortunes and their "sacred honor" to each other and to their country. How puny a group of citizens saying, "I pledge allegiance to the flag," sounds compared to all that.

Patriot

Why is Mad Dog ranting about something so trivial as The Pledge? It is because of a conversation he had with someone who  said he was opposed to public schools, the whole idea of public education because it was "all indoctrination."

Mad Dog asked him what he meant by that word, "indoctrination." 

"Telling kids there are more than two sexes. Hauling some kid into the principal's office and suspending him because, on the bus ride home from Exeter High School, he got into an argument with a girl and he said, 'There are only two sexes,' and she reported him for that. And the principal said that kid had violated some code about respecting all kids and their feelings or whatnot."

The boy was suspended and not allowed to play in the weekend football game.

Mad Dog agreed this was a grievous violation of that Catholic boy's First Amendment rights in the name of some sort of purity test, some sort of creed. 

If all the students at Exeter High School are forbidden to question the proposition that "sexuality is fluid and there are more than two genders" then what is being taught  there is not free inquiry, but dogma.

One Patriot, Dozen Thugs

Ironically, the case which established the right of the individual to not embrace the party line came from New Hampshire, to the Supreme Court of the United States in Woolely vs Maynard, 1977. In that case Mr. Maynard, a Jehovah's Witness, said that his religion taught him to value life over all else, especially someone else's idea of what constitutes freedom, and he did not want to have to drive around with "Live Free or Die" on his license plate, a plate the state requires him to display, in effect requiring him to embrace the state's idea which conflicts with his own. He taped over the motto and was promptly arrested.

The Court found that the right to not speak, to not embrace a state belief, is integral to freedom of speech.

So what of  the child in school who refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag?

The most famous case was West Virginia v Barnette, where a child, also a Jehovah's witness, refused to pledge, and Justice Robert O. Jackson (of Nuremberg fame) wrote:

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

The state argued the Pledge was necessary for national cohesion in a time when differing opinions and beliefs were threatening to tear apart the nation.

But such insistence may, indeed, amount to indoctrination.

As Dave Chapelle said, "I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?" 

What the under educated principal of Exeter High School did was to insist a student embrace an orthodoxy rather than initiating a discussion of the idea of what gender is, if it differs from sex, chromosomal or preferential, and to seek a way students with different opinions could be brought to understand the other person's thinking. Exeter High School failed on every important level.

But that does not mean we have to fail in Hampton by opening meetings with a prayer or a pledge or anything other than, "Glad you all could attend today to do our town's business."

There is a determined core in the New Hampshire legislature right now, who want to destroy public schools, which they regard as nothing more than indoctrination centers. Of course, part of that coalition is determined to replace these government indoctrination centers with "protestant teachers" of the True Word, but that's another subject. 

The question is, what is "indoctrination" and how does it differ from "education?"

Mad Dog would venture that indoctrination seeks to teach a single version of any argument, whereas education, which means "a leading out" seeks to explore all aspects of every issue, to hear all sides and to weigh them and to allow the student to come to his or her--or "their" if you believe in all that-- own conclusions.