There was a push in Ohio to have a flag for every county a few years ago (maybe for the bicentennial in 2003), and they’re almost all quite hideous. The statehouse has 88 flagpoles that can be used to fly all of them, and it looks like a fabric store exploded when they put them up.
Wow, you Canadians are such monarchists! I have never seen that in a classroom here in yer actual Britain.
Well, there’s considerable regional variation - I doubt that there’s many pictures of HM in classrooms in Quebec.
Is that Dutchman playing with a yo-yo?
In elementary school, I believe there was a flag in most classrooms and we recited the Pledge every day, and sang patriotic songs at least once a week. By middle school, I think we were reciting the Pledge once a week, and I honestly don’t recall if every classroom had a flag, or just my homeroom where we recited the pledge. By high school, most classrooms didn’t have a flag, the Pledge was rare, and in one memorable occasion, a teacher turned off the intercom rather than allow the Pledge to take up his instruction time. This was Oregon, and I graduated from high school in 2006.
My wife teaches elementary school in central Texas and I believe they perform both the Pledge of Allegiance as well as the Texas pledge. Being American (and esp. Texan) is a big deal to Texans, and you’ll see massive flags all over the place, so it doesn’t seem odd to have them in the classroom.
As an aside…My father was an exchange officer in the UK in the 80’s and I remember praying and singing hymns in morning assembly at the local school. It didn’t strike me as odd at the time as I had been brought up in a religious household, but in retrospect it seems odd when compared to how things are done in the US.
No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong. It starts, “I led the pigeons to the flag.”
In the school I teach in, we have the US flag and the Texas flag, and every day we are led (over the intercom) first in the Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag, and then the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas flag.
I’ve always thought that this kind of rote, passionless recitation of national (and state) allegiance is really pointless.
And it seems to me that pledging allegiance to two different entities kind of defeats the purpose of a pledge of allegiance.
I’ve never seen an Arkansas flag in a classroom. All of our classes, even in high school, had an American flag, and, yes, we did the whole pledge of allegiance thing, It was built into our schedule: the first class is 5 minutes longer to accommodate it.
In junior high, it was a bit of an honor to be allowed to lead the pledge over the intercom. It might have also been in high school, but we had band that period and I only heard it a handful of times: we’d either play through it or be outside marching.
I rent high schools for political conventions here in Minneapolis, MN frequently, and I have had to start listing in the equipment needed “US flag” – we were running into schools that claimed not to have one available in their auditorium.
Every classroom I was in up through high school had a US flag. I can’t ever remember seeing an Ohio flag displayed permanently. We said the pledge every day in elementary school, every Monday in middle school, and then every day again in high school (although during my junior and senior years I was practically unsupervised at that time of day, and the “MUST SAY PLEDGE” instinct went away pretty quickly). I graduated in 2007.
In Elementary (Years 1-5/6 (depending on whether you had Kindergarten) of schooling) school we had a flag in every classroom, said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and had a “moment of silence” for what I assume was prayer. In middle school we had the flags, but I remember the pledge being rarer, maybe once a week, maybe “whenever the principal felt like it.” No moment of silence usually.
In high school, no pledge or anything. I honestly can’t recall whether or not a flag was in every room, despite this only being 4.5 years ago. I’m loathe to guess because now if I try to imagine the rooms I’m not sure if I’ll remember the flags because they actually existed or because I’m creating my own fake memories. Either way, certainly there was no pledge every day (though there was the customary national anthem at sporting events).
I was a bad little boy and the idea of swearing fealty to my country made me feel funny (in not quite so many words), and between that and budding atheism making “under God” uncomfortable I had to teach myself how to not get caught not saying the pledge…
Five times doth thy sevens show,
for Corsicana, happy home.
Oh glorious seat of Navarro,
Never more thy sons shall roam.
I think they’re trying to make up for all the people in the other states that don’t do a pledge at all.
Bravo!
Of course, it IS Texas, which (like cats and divine status) has never forgotten that it was its own sovereign country once.
If you’re saying that Texans have an overinflated sense of themselves then I can’t argue with that.
But that still doesn’t resolve the issue of allegiance.
Except that’s exactly what federalism implies: there is no single sovereign power, no single sovereign government. Sovereignty is divided between the state and federal governments, and individual citizens do in fact owe allegiance to both governments.
It doesn’t imply that at all. Divided sovereignty exists in the United States as a matter of governmental structure and authority, not as a matter of nationality or divided loyalty. There’s no such thing as the “national security” of a state government or treason against a state government. A resident of a state owes the state conformance with its laws, but not loyalty.