Teachers don’t only hate kids, they hate the pledge of allegiance. At least one of my former teachers, Tom Zachek (writing about it in a recent Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel column) does.

Needless to say, his anti-pledge B.S. condemns reciting the pledge as “mindless drudgery.” This is an affront to the fact that public education has the market cornered on mindless drudgery. (Not to mention a monopoly on systematically neutering, sapping, and destroying the potential of entire generations, but hey, that’s not as bad as the pledge of allegiance, right?)

I mean, even the article’s title starts out poorly:

Reciting pledge in schools is mindless practice

You want to talk about mindless practice? For years after high school, I had the urge to get up whenever I heard something that sounded like a bell. That’s the kind of institutionalization you only learn in two places: school and prison.

At least the pledge is only a minute or so. School is 17 years.

Expect me to condemn the shameful lack of patriotism of today’s youth? Quite the opposite.

I don’t give a flying fudge about patriotism in this context. That a teacher hates patriotism is nothing new to me.

What’s important is what this article says about Zachek and those who think like him.

They hate the pledge because of the “under God” thing, as you’ll see later. Fine, whatever.

But the EXCUSE presented here is that the pledge is mindless drudgery?

What do you call seven hours a day of public school? Stimulating?

[Bleep] you, teachers.

That’s why this argument against the pledge is hollow. Zachek’s case is … what? That the pledge is as boring and monotonous as the school it takes place in? Clearly, the problem is deeper than that.

(Again: unless he wants to admit that school is pointless too).

This mindless practice should be abandoned.

Yes, abandon mindless practice and endless routine-based drudgery!

Oh, he just means the pledge, not the Department of Education. I thought he had a valid point for a second. In fact, I was ready to write him in for President.

Nearly everything the pledge says is inappropriate or downright untrue.

Let’s look at what the pledge actually says, shall we:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Liberty and justice for all - how could we impose these beliefs on kids?

To begin with, it makes little sense to expect schoolchildren to understand what pledging allegiance means.

It also makes little sense for children to understand what the [bleep] is happening to them when they’re forcibly removed from their homes and inundated with BS theory 7 hours a day for no apparent reason other than some vague notion of “learning.”

Kindergartners don’t understand kindergarten any more than they understand something like the pledge, but teachers and parents force it anyway because “eventually they’ll see the value in it.”

But nothing like that applies to the pledge, right?

Anyone see a double standard developing at this point? If not, the education system failed you.

That’s a sophisticated concept, one that I’m not sure school-age children are capable of fully grasping. But they routinely echo the words, like drones, and we think something is being accomplished. I don’t think anything is.

If I replaced “pledge” with “school” here, there would be no difference. And it would actually make Zachek correct.

Hate the pledge all you want. But don’t condemn it because it works exactly the way English lectures and long division work. I’m going to put it here again:

But they routinely echo the words, like drones, and we think something is being accomplished. I don’t think anything is.

Do you see the irony of a retired teacher condemning the pledge for having kids “routinely echo” words and having people “think something is being accomplished”?

Lectures and homework share the same futility AND vanity, but that irony blows straight past Zachek’s head.

Teachers should be enslaved.

I’m going to print it again:

But they routinely echo the words, like drones, and we think something is being accomplished. I don’t think anything is.

Right - how horrible for a one-minute pledge. The real cruelty is what happens in the 6 hours and 59 minutes after.

The most obvious problem with the pledge is the phrase “under God.” Added in 1954 in a surge of religious and patriotic fervor and intended as a misguided antidote to communist leanings, it has no place in a statement about allegiance to the United States. The First Amendment is violated every time every schoolchild is compelled to say it.

Okay, whatever. We can stop saying the pledge in schools.

This is the source of Zachek’s hatred for the pledge: “Under God.” NOT that it’s monotonous (Zachek isn’t consistent about that point unless he also wants SCHOOLS to be stopped as a requirement), and not the John Edwards “two Americas” BS you’ll read below. You’re reading another sardine-in-a-can liberal educator who can’t stand blows to his Federally-sponsored ego and intrusions on sacred school time.
Teachers get whole CAREERS out of BSing their students, but just one hint of something like the phrase “under God” coming into their territory? They go nuts.

We may technically be “one nation,” but we are far from “indivisible.” Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history or current events must admit that we are a deeply divided nation. Red states/blue states, North/South, rich/poor, urban/rural - the gaps are everywhere.

This is such an “invented” problem that misunderstands what a PLEDGE is all about. A PLEDGE is an affirmation of our loyalty to an indivisible nation, and a pledge to keep it that way. That’s it.

Sheesh - these are the people teaching your kids, parents. These people influence the qualify of your children’s lives. Just think about that.

Some would say that is our strength. It can be argued that our diversity, our ability to draw upon the resources and abilities of many different kinds of people, is responsible for many of our country’s achievements. Rather than deny our divisions, perhaps we should embrace them. Dealing with diversity is complex and important. Denying it is myopic.

Blah blah blah…again, it’s a “pledge,” not a “statement of undeniable truths”…

And then we have the fiction of “liberty and justice for all.” Where do you want to go with this one? Reservation Indians? Blacklisting and McCarthyism? Jim Crow laws? O.J. Simpson? Gay-bashing? Innocent people wrongly jailed? One set of laws and punishments for the rich and another for the poor?

…he forgot students…

Volumes have been written about the failure of our society to provide liberty and justice for those whom the people in power don’t care for. Yet proponents of the pledge seem to believe all that can be undone by just making kids mouth the phrase. Such nonsense does a disservice to our children.

I’ll tell you what “nonsense” is.

Nonsense is that teachers get three months off every year, get paid well, have “tenure,” “teacher of the year” awards, and still have the balls to complain that they need more credit and pay in society. Tell that to janitors, lunchladies, truck drivers, coal miners, and any of us out there who work 12 months a year.

Nonsense is that these hot-blooded vagina-having liberals are allowed access to your kids - enough access during their formative years to negatively affect them more powerfully than any pledge ever could.

Nonsense isn’t that the pledge is required, it’s that school is. The only reason this sounds radical is because of school itself: the Department of Education is just more Federal-level “New Deal” BS we can do without. But you’d never learn something like that in school.

Nonsense is that teachers are allowed to procreate, let alone are celebrated for being courageous.

Nonsense is what I got for 17 straight years. I’m sick of hearing more of it from teachers now that I’m smart enough to learn on my own.

School is nonsense. Not the pledge.

The pledge’s defenders will argue that it promotes patriotism and that removing it will diminish patriotism. I don’t think so. Do not confuse the pledge with patriotism.

I didn’t argue that. I just argued teachers commit much greater sins against America’s youth than the pledge does.

Patriotism is a complex feeling about one’s country that is only genuinely arrived at after some understanding of the country.

It’s actually quite a pure feeling, like courage and fortitude. Overcomplicating things is a natural byproduct of sitting on your butt all day and “teaching,” without any actual knowledge of what, by “doing,” one can accomplish and feel. An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

[Patriotism] cannot be generated merely by rote recitation.

Fine. I accept this. But somehow boring lectures are different?

And patriotism should not be blind.

Let me tell you something I’ve learned, post-school: all virtues are blind, or should be. Blind faith, blind courage, blind hope, blind persistence achieved all the greatness we possess that allows teachers to eat bon bons all day and wax theoretical. The pledge of allegiance has nothing to do with blind patriotism: it is, in fact, exposing it bare.

Yes, our youth should be proud of their country. American history should be taught well, so that they know about their country, both its accomplishments and its shortcomings. But requiring public schools to offer the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem each day accomplishes none of that. The state Legislature should get rid of the requirement.

I’m actually quite fine with this.

The problem isn’t with Zachek condeming the pledge - that’s easy for any liberal with a problem with the word “God” to do. (Okay, so “liberal with a problem with the word “God” is redundant.) And I can maybe accept that - separation of church and state and all.

But the total ignorance for the system at hand - I guess I couldn’t expect any more from a teacher.

I’ve had teachers who got insulted if you yawned during their class. An actor being paid in the real world would say “oh no, my performance must be terrible if they’re yawning!” But teachers? No, it becomes the audience’s fault.

Only in fairy tale education land is the student responsible for the teacher being so boring.

So should I really expect Zachek to see the irony here? Probably not.

School makes kids fat, lazy, stupid, slow, and socially conditioned to accept what life gives them.  Zachek wants the minute it takes to say the pledge given back to teachers. I want 17 years of my life back.

Lectures go in one ear and out the other because people were never built to be grown and farmed and then harvested like plantlife. Everyone just accepts this system because everyone else is doing it.

But nevermind that - the PLEDGE is the problem. Right.

It’s this kind of ignorance that is the real problem.

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