|
June 28 / 30, 2002
This
Weekend's Features
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahual Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
Weekend
Edition
June 28/30, 2002
Teachers and
the Flag
Taking
the Pledge
by Michael Yates
In 1991, nearly 30 years after I had graduated
from high school, my twin sons, then 12 years old and seventh
graders at a Pittsburgh public school, read an interesting story
in their language arts class. A young teacher, admired and respected
by her students, refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance
to the flag. For this act of conscience she was fired by the
local school board. She filed suit, charging a violation of her
First Amendment right of free speech. The court ordered her reinstatement,
but in the end she decided not to return to her old job. After
reading the story, the class discussed it with their teacher.
He was of the view that it was wrong for the teacher not to stand
because this was disrespectful to the beliefs of others. One
of my sons agreed with the teacher in the story, arguing that
no one should have to stand. Besides, he said, there was not
"liberty and justice for all" in the United States,
so the pledge was a lie. My son's comments were met with stern
criticism by his teacher who quickly shut off further discussion.
A few days later, my wife and I met with
our son's team of teachers. We mentioned the flag salute story
to the language arts teacher and expressed our disappointment
with his reaction to it. Wouldn't this have been a great opportunity
to strengthen the students' understanding of the importance of
free speech in a democracy? The teacher, bearded and casually
dressed, tried to disarm us. He was a product of the sixties,
he said, and did not personally care if the students said the
pledge or not. But out of respect for the beliefs of others,
the students had to stand. My wife disagreed; standing was the
same thing as saying the words. She told him that our son had,
in fact, been refusing to stand for the pledge in his home room
and that we had sent the required note to the school stating
that we did not object to his actions. The teacher said that
this would be unacceptable in his home room; had our son been
his charge, he would have had to stand in the hall during the
pledge. My wife told him that if that had happened, the teacher
would have faced a lawsuit, at which point the conversation ended.
For two weeks our son sat quietly at
his desk during the pledge. Then we received a phone call from
his teacher-team leader who left a message for us to contact
her about a problem with our son. We could not reach her that
day, and she did not return our calls. We worried about what
our son had done. When he came home, he told us that his team
leader was angry that he would not stand for the pledge. She
had walked by his home room, seen that he was not standing, marched
in and confronted him. When he refused to stand, she grabbed
him by the arm and pulled him out of the room. I was so incensed
that I ranted for three days, but we let it go because she did
not do it again. Then, she called a second time. Could I speak
with my son about his refusal to stand? He was setting a bad
example for the other students. I asked her if maybe my son wasn't
setting a good example by showing his classmates that we live
in a free country, where people must respect differences. I told
her that one of the reasons that we sent our children to the
urban public schools was so that they would get to know children
of different racial and cultural backgrounds and respect differences.
If the teachers themselves did not respect differences among
their students, then weren't we all in a lot of trouble? Finally,
I reminded her that my son could not be legally required to stand
for the pledge. In a distant voice, she said, Okay, she'd let
it drop. I said goodbye, and she said, "Have a nice day."
Our other son, then fifteen, was a sophomore
in a city high school. He wouldn't stand for the pledge either,
and he too was hassled by his teachers. During his freshman year,
his home room teacher insisted that he stand and when he refused,
we got a phone call. After some discussion, his teacher said
that we would have to write a letter giving our approval for
our son's behavior. We refused to do this; our son continued
to sit, and nothing happened. Until, that is, a substitute teacher
confronted him and publicly berated him for insulting his country.
Didn't he realize that the city's taxpayers were paying for his
education? He told her that he had a job and paid taxes too.
She persisted. Why wouldn't he stand? He just did not want to.
Eventually he explained that he had moral reasons for not standing,
and she gave up. But during the next year, this substitute became
his regular home room teacher, and we went through another round.
This time she pulled out all the stops to pressure us to get
him to stand. She kept asking if he had a religious reason for
not standing, implying that this would be acceptable. We told
her that his reasons were moral, but she did not appear able
to grasp this. Finally, she aimed her big gun by hinting that
other students were harassing him, and there was a chance that
he would be physically harmed. We advised her that she had better
see to it that this did not happen, perhaps by explaining to
the class that no one had to stand for the pledge. Our fears
were allayed when our son told us that he had never been threatened
and what the teacher really feared was that other students would
refuse to stand.
We wasted a lot of energy trying to uphold
our sons' right to peacefully refuse to salute a flag in a public
school classroom. We were surprised by the persistence of the
teachers, and amazed and saddened by the ironies which abound
here. Our younger son's antagonist was a black woman teaching
in a school which had an overwhelmingly black student body. Their
parents were, for the most part, poor, and they lived in neighborhoods
ravaged by underemployment, substandard housing, drugs, gangs,
and the highest rates of infant mortality in the nation. They
faced the same brutal discrimination faced by all black persons,
and their prospects were bleak. Would it been too much to expect
her to have seen the hypocrisy of the pledge of allegiance with
its propaganda of "liberty and justice for all"? How
could any black person believe this, let alone pledge allegiance
to it?
All of the teacher-patriots are members
of the powerful Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers. Through aggressive
organizing and bargaining, punctuated in the early years by long
strikes and defiance of court injunctions, this union has won
contracts which are the envy of teachers across the state. City
teachers are among the highest paid wage earners in the area;
salaries in excess of $60,000 per year are common. An excellent
grievance procedure and system of local union stewards have practically
eliminated the power of the School Board and the administration
to arbitrarily discipline teachers. In other words, the union
has secured the civil liberties of its members, their right to
act as independent, self-respecting professionals. One would
think, therefore, that the teachers would appreciate the importance
of civil liberties. Yet this is far from being the case. It is
fine for the teachers to stand up to their employers and demand
that their rights be respected. Yet let a student demand the
same and the teachers become as authoritarian as the steel moguls
who once made their parents beg for their supper.
So, what is going on here? Why, in situations
which must have been common knowledge in the two schools, did
not a single teacher offer my sons support? Why had seemingly
liberal and progressive teachers, loyal union members all, made
such an issue out of what was essentially a mindless act of obedience
to the state?
Several explanations might be offered.
When teachers do things which students do not like, the teachers
often try to pass the blame along to the administration. It is
hard to see, however, how administrators could have punished
a teacher whose students exercised their legal right not to salute
the flag. If a teacher had been disciplined, the union would
surely have filed and won a grievance. A second excuse might
be that parents would have caused trouble if they had found out
that students refused to say the pledge. Other students besides
my sons had refused to stand for the pledge, but after receiving
a call from a teacher, their parents ordered them to stand and
they did. Teachers might have faced some parental anger, but
teachers did not mind angry parents when they struck to benefit
themselves. Besides, parents cannot do much to teachers so strongly
protected by union contract. And, in any case, is it not the
job of teachers to challenge their students to think critically
about all issues, to be leaders who develop new ideas rather
than just followers of old ones? If teachers never step outside
conventional beliefs, they might not face parental antagonisms,
but they also will not help their students to develop the imaginations
necessary to solve the world's endless list of problems.
Another possible explanation might be
that the teachers were, themselves, unaware or unwilling to exercise
their duty to promote critical thinking. As a college teacher
for the past 29 years, I can attest to the worthlessness of much
of what passes for teacher education. Somehow it is imagined
that a student who does not major in a subject area will know
enough about a subject to teach it to others. The ignorance of
education majors in a wide variety of subjects is legendary,
yet they all manage to get A's in their education classes. The
person who taught my sons history or economics may never have
taken an advanced course in these fields. Public school teachers
are unlikely to have had a critical education or to have mastered
a subject area, so it is little wonder that they might be incapable
of making a critical analysis or instilling in their students
the importance of civil liberties
Still, blaming the teachers begs a question:
why are teachers so often lacking in critical intelligence? Why
are they "trained" in what appears to be such a thoughtless
manner? If, as our leaders keep telling us, our young people
are inadequately educated, then why do our schools tread along
the same tired paths? The time wasted trying to make my sons
conform could have been spent teaching them to think for themselves.
To know why teachers expended such extraordinary
effort to get my children to salute the flag, we have to ask
what it is that schools are all about. In my view, schools are
essentially purveyors of misinformation and promoters of behavior
consistent with the requirements of the economic system. Most
students are going to be workers someday. They will be expected
to work hard at jobs requiring limited skills and to obey orders.
Political and business leaders argue that the education system
is failing because it is not producing people literate enough
to do the work which will help the United States to compete with
our economic rivals. But this is largely propaganda, which we
can see clearly when these same critics also propose a return
to the "basics" and renewed emphasis on discipline,
the very things which are least likely to produce an educated
citizenry. The truth is that the number of jobs requiring extensive
technical, scientific, or literary skills is shrinking as a percentage
of total employment. Our schools have always produced enough
workers to fill these slots, and if they do not today, it is
because the good students now want to make as much money as they
can with as little effort as possible. Is there a shortage of
lawyers or bond brokers or accountants? Would none of these people
have been capable of becoming scientists or engineers?
No, what the schools are expected to
do is churn out people who will do what they are told and not
expect too much in return. What business leaders want is people
who will work harder for less money and keep their mouths shut.
They do not want liberally educated, critical thinkers, precisely
because such people will ask questions and insist on their rights.
It is one thing to get a few future lawyers to become scientists
instead, but it is quite another to encourage people to develop
themselves as fully as possible.
Flag saluting and the nationalism of
which it is a vital part are perfect vehicles to produce the
docile persons the system needs. They teach that obedience is
more important than thinking. Someday students will have to obey
their employers. Someday they will have to march off to war.
What better way to get them ready than to make them pray to the
flag everyday?
When we examine the so-called education
crisis with a critical eye, we see that the schools have not
failed. They are doing what they have always done, preparing
people for a lifetime of thoughtless work and consumption. During
the Gulf War, principals gave teachers yellow ribbons to pass
out to their classes. The teachers did it. The students wore
them and wrote letters to the troops. Critical thinking, much
less opposition, were virtually nonexistent. If actual death
and destruction cannot elicit thought, economic warfare won't
either.
All of this is not to say that there
is no disaster in the public schools. There is, but it has little
to do with the inability of our students to read and write. Our
education crisis is a reflection of a deepening social malaise.
Our society has become more polarized, with a small stratum of
wealthy people confronting a mass of wealthless people facing
grim futures. The poor, largely minority, students in our urban
schools have little to look forward to; there is not and will
not be meaningful work for them to do.
Teachers face sullen and unhappy young
people, products of severe social dysfunction, and instead of
trying to liberate them, they make them salute flags. This is
not likely to work, so they will turn the screws tighter. The
schools will become more prison-like. After all, more black men
of college age are in prison than in college. It is an insidious
system and likely to become more so.
Michael Yates
lives in New York City. He can be reached at: mrmagazine6@earthlink.net.
This Weekend's
Features
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|