Okay so, i was at school in homeroom and i was wondering something- people outside of america, do you also have your own versions of the pledge of allegiance? This might be a really stupid question but I’ve honestly been staying super disconnected from everything outside of my room the past few years. In the case that you don’t know what the f/// im talking about, every day in the middle of the school day the pledge of allegiance is played over the loud speakers to the whole school, and depending on how lenient your teacher is you may be forced to stand facing whatever american flag is in the room, and either stay in absolute silence until its over, or recite the pledge along with whatever student body member was chosen to say it that day. I didn’t do middle school so personally i don’t know what they do in middle school, but in every single grade leading up to the last year of elementary school we were forced to stand still and silent facing the flag and reciting the pledge. And in Highschool we generally aren’t forced to stand usually, but sometimes you’ll get a class with a teacher who stands for the flag or kids just standing up in total silence facing the flag with their hands resting on their chests above their hearts. Its like, super eerie sometimes. Is this normal???? Or is america just weird like that????
No, because I'm actually pissed about this shit.
I'm (sadly) an American citizen, which means that throughout my kindergarten (and possibly first and second, but certainly not third, fourth, and all after) year, every morning, we would do the Pledge of Allegiance. This was very normal for me in my early school years, except some very odd things I just learned today.
I'm currently being online schooled, I was in my history class and the topic of religion in schools came up. From what we were told, most private school are allowed to do religious practices, such as praying, public schools are not. It then got me thinking, if public schools aren't allowed to do religious practices, why is God even mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance?
I never even remembered the damn thing until today, and it was so random. I was curious though, so I asked my teacher. She told us that the Pledge of Allegiance never had anything to do with God up until it was added in during The Red Scare. She even said that yes, most if not all, schools do the Pledge, but they allow people to not participate, whether it was because of the God part or not...
We were never allowed to not participate in the Pledge of Allegiance.
It got me thinking deeper. How many people have to stand and do that shit who are extremely uncomfortable with it? In fact, I had a friend in kindergarten who had recently came in from China, none of us understood religion at all at the time sure, but that means none of us were aligned by a religion, unless we were forced into church by parents. Besides, this friend was Chinese, why should she have to do the Pledge, it's not her native home and she was too young to fully understand that she even moved so far from home.
What about my Native American friend? Sure, I knew her when we didn't do the Pledge, but if she was moving public schools due to doster families, she surely would have done them at some point. Why should she have had to do it? She didn't know anything of God as far as I'm aware, not to mention that she's Native American, she has no reason to respect this place, because whites took the land from the Native Americans. So, was she too forced to participate?
The mere thought of this kind of things feels unconstitutional, to be honest. After all, that's forcing a belief unto an knowing victim who's too young to even understand half the words in the Pledge and is even removing free will, because if a kid doesn't want to participate, they shouldn't have too, but my school didn't give us a choice... it just feels very, very wrong.