The bill allows for individual students to opt out “on the basis of religious conviction or personal belief,” so I’ve got no beef from that angle.
My problem here is the notion that the Pennsylvania state Senate thinks they have that sort of jurisdiction over private schools. Who exactly empowers them to tell, say, a Quaker private school that they have to lead the students in the PoA every morning? That’s none of their business.
(Mods - I don’t know if this is exactly ‘great’ debate material or not, but I couldn’t see that it would fit better anywhere else. Feel free to move it wherever.)
They’ve probably stuck it under the same logic that says the state board of education can dictate the educational standards that a private school or even a home schooling person has to uphold.
This is not to say that I agree with the decision, just that the state does have the ability to mandate things to private education from K - 12.
Private schools in Pennsylvania have to use a state approved curriculum and meet state standards, so it’s not as if being ‘private’ means ‘free from all state regulation’.
That said, I think forcing anyone to sing the National Anthem or recite the Pledge is, whether legally possible or not, wrong as a matter of ethic.
I agree with all posters above. It’s unfortunate that the state should require private schools to recite the P of A. As catsix points out, this requirement follows logic that gives the state far too much control over private schools in other ways as well.
—Students in private and public schools would be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the national anthem each morning under a bill unanimously passed this week by the state Senate.—
My question is… or else what? Public schools may have to follow orders, but to get private schools to fall in line, what are they going to do? What are the threats? On pain of revoking their liscences?
I especially liked this part:
—“It’s getting away from teaching about what our country stands for, what our founders did, and why we have the country we have,” Egolf said.—
Oh, those founders. They loved seeing kids reciting the pledge of allegience in public schools they did. Yes, the old beloved public schools that DIDN’T EXIST in their day and the pledge that also DIDN’T EXIST.
If you want to teach kids about the nation, what it stands for, how it came to be, then for goodness sakes just DO it. That’s what history and civics classes are supposed to be for! There’s a big jump between teaching people about a credo and forcing them to recite the credo as if it was their own, and it’s just plain dishonest to pretend that they are one and the same end: that we aren’t “teaching about” if we aren’t “forcing to recite.”
But, if people want to force schools and kids to recite the pledge or sing songs, okay, I get it: you’ve demonstrated how powerful you are. You can make us jump through hoops to please you. good for you. But for goodness sakes, don’t try to pretend that this is something the founders would have praised. The founders who decried publically led or demanded shows of piety or patriotism!
The only people that are supposed to have to take loyalty oaths and proclaim certain beliefs are politicians and other government employees. THEY are declaring loyalty to US, the people.
catsix - I can see them requiring, under the rubric of educational standards, that private-school kids pass a quiz on the PoA. But a requirement that the school lead the students in daily recitation can hardly be interpreted as an ‘educational standard’. It’s indoctrination, pure and simple.
Now I’m enough of a communitarian (this is where Lib and I part ways) that I believe that a little indoctrination isn’t a bad thing, as long as the right to opt out is preserved. And IMHO, there’s no reason why the commonwealth of Pennsylvania shouldn’t lead kids in a PoA (free from religious phraseology, that is) in its own schools.
But not in private schools. They don’t own them, and there are limits to what they can require them to do.
In order to ensure that all students within the state receive an adequate education, it makes sense that the state have some degree of input into the curriculum of any school, enough to require a school (or a home schooler) to demonstrate that the students are learning to read, write, do arithmetic, and that they’re being exposed to arts, literature, music and science so that they are well prepared for their futures as productive adult members of society.
However, I think that often that basic idea is used to shove through legislation that far over-reaches the basic intent of education. We definitely don’t want one school teaching students to read and write and another school (hypoerbole) having them watch soap operas all day long.
But IMO, this Pledge thing is the long arm of the law reaching too far.
Of course, the point may be moot as a bill passed by one branch of the legislature(which appears unconstitutional on the surface) is hardly likely to make it through the next branch and be signed by the Governor.
Unconstitutional(and unsound) bills originate in every legislature in every state, probably. Most(thankfully) die.
But for the language about the “Pennsylvania Mandatory Public Deceleration of Loyalty Act” being unanimously passed by the state senate, I’d think that this may be an attempt by the legislature to embarrass the Governor. It is hard to believe that the state senate unanimously approved this. Is PA awash in a hysteria of conformist patriotism? There has got to be more to this.
In the U.S. Congress, bills can originate in either house, except that tax bills must originate in the House of Representatives, I believe. Pennsylvania’s legislature may follow different rules, however, for all I know. (Do any states have a one-house legislature?) But I’m fairly certain that in all state governments, a bill is sent to the governor to be signed or vetoed after it is passed by both houses, just as the U.S. Congress sends its bills to the president.
Apparently, the Pennsylvania legislators forget they lost the same issue the first time around.
In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled in its Gobitis (310 US 586) decision that school children could not be forced to recite the Pledge as a part of their school day routine.
As happens in the federal legislature, the bills will be reconciled in a conference committee (with the result voted on again by both chambers) before being sent to the governor for signature into law.
—In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled in its Gobitis (310 US 586) decision that school children could not be forced to recite the Pledge as a part of their school day routine.—
That was 1943. This is a very different court.
—Now I’m enough of a communitarian (this is where Lib and I part ways) that I believe that a little indoctrination isn’t a bad thing—
The ultimate in the tail wagging the dog, IMHO. That a civic community has values that it wants to instill is wonderful. But the government is not the locus to do this. The whole POINT of our polis is that the people’s values collectively inform the decisions of the government via the political process. The government then acts on those values via the law
But to have the government’s authority extend backwards to telling people what their values should BE in the first place defeats that whole purpose: it breaks down the whole rationale behind having a broad political process in the first place. Imagine what will happen as methods of indoctrination become more and more sophisticated. This is not a bussiness we want our government to be in.
Actually the 1940 Gobitis decision referred to above upheld the decision to expel from the public schools children who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. However, three years later–by which point the United States was engaged in a world war–the court reversed that decision, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which I always enjoy quoting lengthy passages of:
If school boards and state legislatures really want to teach students to love their country, I say having them study the Barnette decision will do a lot more than having them recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
As a resident of the aforementioned state, I’d like to note that a unanimous decision among the meatpickles in Harrisburg is not necessarily agreed with by the good citizens of Penn’s Woods. Pennsylvania is just a great big cesspool of hickness bookended by Pittsburgh and Philly.
Case in point: the good and true City Council of my hometown and current habitation, Altoona (pop. 45,000) is, at the moment, doing a convoluted philosophical jig in an attempt to return a Ten Commandents plaque to City Hall, whence it was removed during renovations a few years ago. The latest gambit is the authorization of a “local history” museum/room in the City Hall in which the plaque and various other decoration removed from the old building would be displayed.
The ACLU is not particularly swayed by this little bit of prevarication, thank goodness.
MEB, thank you very much for the quote from Barnette. Mr. Justice Jackson was very much in accord with what I understand America to be all about in that case.
There are three other paragraphs from that case that I think have a lot of pertinence to the discussion being conducted here, the first from Mr. Jackson’s opinion for the court, the second from the concurrence by Messrs. Black and Douglas, and the third from the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Murphy:
