At approximately 8 a.m. around the country, millions of students from ages of five to 18 stand up and recite the pledge of allegiance unless they actively choose to stay seated.
How a student is allowed not to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance varies state to state. A total of 47 states require the Pledge to be recited on the school announcements everyday while individual student participation is less consistent.
According to Brad Dress’s “Here’s Why Students Don’t Have to Recite the Pledge of Allegiance,” states such as Texas, Utah, Pennsylvania, and Florida require students to provide written permission from their parents to opt out of Pledge while states like Oregon, Virginia and Tennessee require non-participating students to remain quiet during recitation.
Illinois, however, is a part of the several states that have no restrictions on students’ rights to recite or stand for the pledge. All students have the right to opt out of the pledge of allegiance due to our First Amendment rights. As for one of the First Amendments stipulations, the government cannot punish you for what you do or do not say- they can’t punish you for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance. This applies to all public schools in America since they are government funded. If you go to a private school, however, they can make you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance since they are not funded by the government and therefore are not bound by the First Amendment.
There’s a lot of reasons why a student may not want to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance. The student body shared a wide set of reasons as to why all choose to sit during the pledge ranging from not feeling comfortable in outwardly supporting the American government to just not feeling like an American.
“I haven’t stood for several years now, but not really out of defiance. I always found it odd how we had to stand and recite a pledge to a country that I feel cares so little about me, and after finding out other countries don’t have this ritual, but that we do have to, I chose to sit down. Though there has been lots of backlash against me doing so, I think there’s importance in being able to stay sitting [as] a message,” an anonymous senior said.
Students currently find themselves surrounded by a whirlwind of political controversy and normalized distrust for politicians no matter what their stance is. It seems a lot of students have good reasons for not reciting or standing for the Pledge, and some say it’s frustrating when teachers or staff think students exercising their rights as being disrespectful.
“I occasionally have students telling me that they’ve gotten reprimanded for not standing for the pledge. I guess occasionally students are threatened with being written up, but I don’t think anyone has actually followed through. [The] freedom of speech covers student’s choices about whether to participate in the pledge or not,” and anonymous staff member said.
Although this may sound like a new movement, it was in 1943 when the Supreme Court ruled that forcing students into saluting the flag or saying the pledge would violate their First Amendment right in the case of “West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette”. Students have had the right not to stand for over 70 years, but are continuously being mistaken as unruly.
“I usually stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because I feel like I’m required to, not because I’m very patriotic. I don’t mind showing appreciation for my country, and I’m not all that religious, if much at all, so standing doesn’t mean much to me […] However, I don’t think anyone should be forced to stand for the pledge if they don’t want to. I do not believe it is right to make someone stand for something they do not believe in. It is something you do on your own accord,” Another anonymous senior said.
Whether or not students choose to stand for the Pledge we, as a school ,should accept these students’ decisions. A way the Editorial staff thought of helping students and teachers understand students rights surrounding the Pledge is mentioning it during school expectation events. At the beginning of the year when teachers spend a week before school starts to go over class expectations and syllabuses, they can talk to teachers about it. For students they can go over their right to sit or stand at the expectation assemblies they have at the beginning of each semester. Providing information to both teachers and students about the Pledge easily would prevent misunderstandings between students and teachers on whether or not they are required to stand during the Pledge of allegiance.
