Perspectives on the Pledge
8:01 A. M.: To Stand or Not To Stand?

By Alex Holachek (March 17, 2006)

Every school day at 8:01 a.m., students at George Mason make a small, perhaps insignificant, but nevertheless fascinating choice: They either stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance or they don’t. If you could have a bird’s eye view into all the classrooms of our school at the moment when Principal Snee’s voice comes over the loudspeaker following the minute of silence, you might be surprised at what you saw.

In some classrooms, every single student would remain sitting. In others, all inhabitants would be standing, their mouths forming the thirty-one words of the traditional statement of patriotism that schoolchildren first recited in 1892.

As of 2001, all Virginia schools are required by law to conduct a “daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in each classroom of the school division.” (Prior to this decision, the Pledge of Allegiance was only recited at George Mason on special occasions.) Yet students are within their First Amendment rights, as established by a slew of court cases in the 1970’s, if they do not participate. But most of the 40 percent or so of George Mason students who do not stand and recite the pledge are not doing so with a well-thought-out ideological protest present in those 70s’ cases. Rather, they act on a nebulous sentiment composed of early-morning laziness combined with an inability to see the “point” of the daily recitations.

Although senior Maya Cough-Shultz stands for the pledge out of respect, she succinctly sums up the aforementioned attitude when she says, “I don’t normally say the pledge because I don’t feel the need to pledge my allegiance to the country every morning. My day-to-day actions already demonstrate that I’m a caring, responsible citizen.”

Conformity is another possible explanation for those classrooms full of students who all participate, or who en masse do not participate, in the recitation of the pledge. Mr. Terry Marselle, a GM psychology teacher who recites the pledge every morning while the entirety of his zero block class remains sprawling in their seats, offers the following explanation: “I don’t think the fact that they [his students] don’t stand for the pledge has any correlation with their patriotism. It’s 8:00 and they’re teenagers. And a lot of it is peer pressure: who wants to be the only dork standing up?”

In complete contrast to Mr. Marselle’s class, Mr. Michael McNamara’s zero block class is one of those classrooms in which not a single student sits through the pledge. The government teacher says, “I think that all kids should stand up as a show of respect. I do require the kids in my class to stand. For most kids who don’t want to stand, it’s less an issue of conviction than one of laziness. There are some things in our society that you just do. Especially in this time of war when we have American service members protecting our rights overseas. It’s important to remember that the Pledge of Allegiance isn’t about pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth. You’re pledging to your country, and to your fellow countrymen and women. It’s a show of respect. That said, I think you have the right to choose not to say the pledge.”

George Mason’s other government teacher has a slightly different perspective. Though most of the students in Mr. Christopher Pikrallidas’s morning class stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, he says that it’s “unfortunate that we have to try to stimulate patriotism by having the pledge. But for those students who will be conventionally patriotic, they will see the value of the pledge later on. I’m afraid people say it mechanically. I don’t like the fact in general that standing and pledging is equated with patriotism.”

Principal Bob Snee says that teachers should be encouraging students to stand for the pledge. “It’s always proper to respect the flag of the nation in which you find yourself. We can’t legally require anyone to stand up. Educators simply need to encourage this in a positive way.” Mr. Snee expressed a wish that all students would “stand up, sit down, and pledge in between if you will.”

In the end, the reason that many students either stand and recite the pledge or don’t is because of some combination of peer and teacher pressure. Nothing illustrates this conclusion so much as the recent observation of a student in a large first block class. The student, who wishes to remain anonymous so as not to get her classmates in trouble, noted that everybody stood and many recited the pledge every morning when the teacher was in the room. But when the teacher left one day on an errand, only two people stood for the Pledge of Allegiance.

That is not to say that some students do not hold the Pledge of Allegiance in very high esteem, and that others do not have valid reasons for not saying it. Sophomore Peter Davis said, “I choose not to say the pledge because I believe that students in today’s world shouldn’t be fixated on the type of nationalism implicit in the pledge, but rather that they should be focused on internationalism. We shouldn’t pledge allegiance to America, we should pledge allegiance to humanity.” When asked whether he stands for the pledge, he replied, “Sometimes. When I’m not too lazy.”