Thinking through patriotism

James Fraser: Not surprisingly, the greatest debates in American education right now are about what are the standards for the history curriculum: Whose history gets told, how do you do it? Do you tell mainline history, or that of people who got left out, and include dissenting voices as a critical part of it? The other issue is, to what degree does the school in its own structure model democracy? There is something absurd about sitting kids down in rows and lecturing to them about how they have to be democratic citizens later on.

John Pierson: I think students in these situations are always instinctively riled when there's a moment in which, for example, the school charges [the student government] with making a particular decision, and it makes it, and [the decision] perhaps doesn't match what the school had hoped the student government was going to decide, and quickly turns it over. That'd be a good example of bad modeling.

Chau Hua: One of the reasons I'm so patriotic is that I know what my parents have been through. They were immigrants from Vietnam ... boat people who took a terrifying five-day journey by boat to Malaysia. They came to this country and found opportunity, and I think that what they really wanted was to know [that] if they worked really hard, they could get somewhere. In the same vein, I've had opportunity.... I went to public school, and we did have to say the pledge and the "Star Spangled Banner," and I think that was enormously valuable, because the values that I cherish today are largely the ones I learned as a child. I think having had those shows of patriotism as a child created norms in our society.

When you say, there should be more patriotism in schools, I agree, because I wonder what it would say to our society if we didn't have that. Would it say, it's fine not to be proud to be an American?

Carolyn Marvin: There are lots of sources of patriotism display besides the schools. Art does it; it's all over the movies. Besides that, you have voluntary organizations, like the Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts, and Kiwanis, and there's patriotic display there. So that's a different form. Then you have official patriotism. Then there is advertising.

I came from a generation that said the pledge and sang the "Star Spangled Banner," and then opposed the government and our parents. So you can't be sure what the outcome will be. But I'm not sorry I had that set of symbols to call on. I don't think we can assume what we'll get out of that is a particular patriotic posture.

I remember [during the civil rights movement] a photo of an African-American boy and some white sheriff standing across from him.... The boy had the flag in his hand, and the white official was trying to rip it away from him. The flag became one of the things the civil rights movement used. Even the antiwar movement subverted the flag and used it ... for example, as a peace symbol. It's easy to forget that in fact the left has also made use of the flag, very powerfully. The assumption that the flag belongs to those who are militaristic is not always accurate historically.

James Fraser: I think it's too soon to tell [if we're at a turning point]. A lot will have to do with how this rolls out.... I hear a lot of students and faculty and friends in my neighborhood and church asking questions they weren't asking before. That could all subside and by the first of the year, it's back to business as usual.

Chau Hua: I don't think it's necessarily a turning point, but it's creating an immense reference point for reflection.

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