Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Having attended medium size (100-300/grade) public school in southern West Virginia (Bluefield) from 1966 to 1975, my own experiences with the Pledge are dated, but coincide more with the SCOTUS’s 1943 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette decision than KAC and DD’s experiences. In 1968, as I became more politically aware, I stopped rising and reciting the Pledge in the classroom, and was not spoken to publicly or privately by teacher or school official about doing so. My classmates though this was pretty cool behavior, though I wasn’t only one of the first few, not the first, to do it. By the end of the third grade, by my imprecise recollection, about half of the class continued to recite the Pledge. In the fourth grade, the school began “tracked” dividing of classes according to standardized test scores (the “West Virginia Basic” test, which to the best I’ve been able to determine from conversations with educators, was discontinued around 1980). I was placed in the “A track” class, where the Pledge was not included in the class routine, eliminating our choice to stand and recite, or not.

Perhaps the 1960s and 70s US was more culturally liberal than the US of twenty years later. Regionally, I’d describe southern WV as having mixed political and ethical ideologies – while, there was general sympathy for “leftist” causes such the UMWA vs. mine owners and corporations, there was a long tradition of evangelical Christian fundamentalism. This pervasive religiosity posed more difficulty for me than compulsory patriotism - while I was never punished nor even criticized for rejecting the Pledge, the same was not true for refusing to participate in “voluntary” pubic school Bible classes. Although not formally disciplined, those who elected the alternative to these classes were required to spend the class time cleaning the school bathrooms, an odious enough duty that nearly all of us eventually acquiesced to attending Bible class. I still rather pity my poor Bible teacher.

Another possibility explanation for the difference between my experience and that of others is related to socioeconomic class. My father was a physician, and many of my fellow students had similarly high-status parents. I believe this caused school administrators to be careful to avoid any actionable infringements on our civil rights.