So long as it wasn't an Enterprise pledge

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. "
-- Justice Louis Brandeis (1928)

" Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may."
-- Mark Twain

"Liberty and freedom have to be more than just words."
-- James T. Kirk, The Omega Glory


This is the kind of story that convinces me of two things, primarily because the teacher says it was a "extremely important and patriotic moment".

1) if I had a child in school right now, the school and all the teachers would hate me. Police would probably be involved as well.

2) The most frequent teachers of "patriotism" have no idea what it means.

At the point where the teacher told the mother she should be ashamed, this would have been my response.

My child should be teaching the principles of patriotism to the rest of your class. It takes more than rote memorization of borderline government propaganda to evoke patriotism. Regardless of whether you think this was parody of or an homage to the Pledge, it required critical thinking and a deeper level of understanding than was required to simply spout off the words like a robot.
My son learned a very important lesson today, but it's not the one you meant to teach him by punishing him. He learned there can be no patriotism where coercion is involved.
On top of all this, that pledge was damned funny and bordering on genius. You do realize there was an entire episode of Star Trek devoted to the what it means to be a patriot of the United States that climaxes with a recitation of the Preamble?

Of course first I would probably be red-faced and wanting to strangle every authority figure in the room. Then I might be able to come up with something like the response above.

Then we'd go over to Cafe Press and get some shirt with Worf or Spock saying "Slaves recite, patriots question" or something else similarly inflammatory. I also would go ahead and take off work the next day since I know I would have to pick him up from school.


[BTW, if you read the blog comments, Mom didn't make him write the Pledge, and she confronted the teacher. It was also a parent who complained, not the teacher. ]