HS principal orders students to forgo Pledge of Allegiance, citing shutdown

HS principal orders students to forgo Pledge of Allegiance, citing shutdown

Principal Pat Jones
Principal Pat Jones

If “the foundation of every state is the education of its youth,” as Diogenes supposedly wrote, the threat of a collapse of the U.S. is imminent. Just when you thought that a nation whose adult population is dumber on average than humans wordlwide couldn’t get any dumber, The Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan reports (via Weasel Zippers):

On Oct. 7, Alliance High School principal Pat Jones told students they wouldn’t be reciting the pledge that day, pointing out that the federal government had been partially shut down since Oct. 1. Scottsbluff [Neb.] television station KDUH reported that some students were outraged by Jones’ decision, and one woman said her son stood up in class and recited the pledge anyway….

On Monday, Jones declined to comment and referred questions to the district superintendent, Troy Unzicker.

Unzicker said Jones hadn’t cleared his plan with administrators beforehand, but Unzicker said he soon heard about it after school board members started getting calls and emails from parents. Near as he knew, Unzicker said, all the calls were critical of Jones.

Unzicker managed to find a silver lining in Jones’s imbecilic act, claiming that he did get students talking about government. Specifics were not given, but it’s easy to imagine the kinds of questions students might have posed. For example, “Does the government allow people as stupid as the principal to walk around freely without a leash?”

Maybe the story wouldn’t seem quite so odious were it not for other recent developments from the world of education, including the showing in a Wisconsin school of a video urging students to pledge allegiance to Barack Obama. This happened three days before the shutdown began. Another embarrassing chapter in the annals of American education was written on Sept. 11 of this year, when a Boston school canceled the Pledge of Allegiance in favor of a recitation over its public address system of a poem about the hardships of being a Muslim in America.

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Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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