PUNDIT RIGHT: Should We Fire Teachers Who Won’t Say Pledge of Allegiance?

I refuse to say the pledge. So fire me. I'm a teacher, and a damn good one by any measure. I take kids to national levels in science and social studies competitions, my proficiency rates for state mandated tests are in the high 90s (much higher than the state average of around 50%), my middle school writing students regularly get published in literary journals, and my students are respectful citizens who contribute to the community (our latest project is one in which we are making audio books to give to local nursing homes). On top of that, I am a disabled Iraqi veteran who spent ten years in the army before being injured in Iraq. I have served in Kosovo, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq, not to mention various humanitarian missions in the US. I was willing to give up some of my rights to serve my country faithfully. And after that service, I recognize the value of not only standing up for what I believe in, but also being willing to lay down my life and my livelihood for that belief.

And if there is one thing I believe in, it is the power to choose my path. I am no longer a soldier. I am no longer bound by the choices I made to give up freedoms to serve my country. I refuse to pledge my allegiance to either an inanimate object or a country that values reactionary measures over proactive solutions.

So fire me. I will work somewhere else where I am not required, every morning, to recite an oath of allegiance to principles I do not value.

Fire me. But I warn you: in doing so, you will lose the best of the best.

your intolerance is showing. why should they be denied employment? because they are not required to teach and say the pledge. freedom of choice. swear loyalty?all reciting a pledge does is teach obedience and why are pledging to a flag?do you suffer from iss? Intellectual Stupidity Syndrome (ISS).
H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.

Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

I fail to see where I am intolerant , let each follow his own path, where is the intolerance in that.
Do I believe that the United States is superior to all other nations, yes, and second place is a long fall downward.
I have not demonized anyone, those nations which still practice beheading, genital mutilation, hanging live dogs upside down and clubbing to death so the meat will be tastier, kidnapping children and pressing into military service, actively practice slavery, amputating limbs for criminal offense, genocidal wars between tribes, courts that order the sister to be gang raped to punish the crime of the brother, police paid by merchants to murder orphans whom form gangs to steal for survival. Politicians, and military generals whom answer the beck and call of drug cartels. The list is without end. To each their own as long as the keep to their own borders, so be it. Such barbaric practices belong to them.
Perhaps following the words of these long dead "nitwits" may explain the dismal state of educational system of the United States. In no other field of endeavor would anyone permit such an abysmal failure rate of product. To cast out the " professional educators" and allowing those successful in their field of endeavor as instructors would lead to a better educational system. At the bare minimum the bottom 20% of teaches should be fired each year , such that the educational system always has fresh minds coming into the system. Such that none become complacent and realize that dismissal in an option for those whom fail to perform.