My seniors at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., have been both annoyed and amused by a year-old state law that has made them start each day with a moment of silence, during which "each pupil may, in the exercise of his or her individual choice, meditate, pray or engage in any other silent activity."
Though teachers enforce it, the moment has become a joke throughout most of the school. But students are not joking about a bill that passed the just-concluded Assembly this weekend and is expected to be signed into law by Gov. James Gilmore: compulsory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance unless students cite a reason for their objections. All but a few of my seniors are outraged at the thought of being forced to recite the pledge and thankful that this is their last year in a Virginia public school.
Proponents of the moment of silence and pledge can argue that the 70 seconds they take from the school day is no big deal. In a way, that's true. But taken in context, they are disturbing manifestations of the widespread attempt by politicians, most of them conservatives, to force schools across the country to perform rhetorical or symbolic rituals associated with religious, moral and patriotic values.
Legislators in Kentucky, Ohio and South Dakota have voted for posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, while another eight states are considering such legislation. A Georgia bill would allow "student-initiated prayer during the school day." The Colorado School Board passed a resolution to encourage "the appropriate display in schools and other public buildings" of the motto, "In God We Trust." South Dakota has allowed teachers and administrators to put up any religious text they wish.
The sponsors of such measures and their allies reap the benefits of appearing to have taken the high road and of being more virtuous than their opponents. Sadly, many legislators in Virginia have gone along with the moment of silence out of fear that opponents would use a vote against them.
State Sen. Warren Barry, who sponsored the moment-of-silence measure, also proposed the Pledge of Allegiance requirement. It's not hard to tell where the 67-year-old ex-Marine is coming from. When other senators proposed that the words "prayer and meditation" be stricken from the moment-of-silence bill, Barry claimed that the whole purpose of his legislation would be defeated.
Under Barry's original Pledge of Allegiance measure, students would have faced automatic suspension if they did not have a note from a member of the clergy excusing them based on religious or philosophical grounds. The compromise allows students to skip reciting the pledge if they have an objection, and any penalties for disrupting the pledge would be left to local school officials.
Barry and the politicians who supported him are either totally out of touch with today's teenagers or merely trying to firm up their conservative base without caring whether their public display of piety and patriotism has any effect on kids at all. In a bold display of disingenuousness, Barry claimed that the purpose of the moment of silence is to reduce violence in the schools.
I can't help but wonder whether Barry knows that the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics show that school violence had been declining steadily for seven years before he introduced his measure. I wonder, too, whether he knows that my school's peer-mediation program, which has students arbitrate between fellow students who are having a disagreement, is a national model for preventing violence.
As I've so often seen during 30 years of teaching, high school kids are infinitely more sophisticated than most adults realize. Ten students from Virginia high schools joined the ACLU in challenging the moment of silence, but a U.S. District judge ruled that because the bill was secular in nature it did not violate the separation clause.
Maybe not, but the students where I teach feel strongly that the heavy-handed effort is far more likely to invite rebellion than conversion. "When you force us to go through a silly ritual every day, it just makes us more angry ... more cynical," says 17-year-old Liz Jennings.
"Forcing us to say the pledge every day makes the flag less important as a symbol," says Megan Doyle, 17. "The moment of silence and the pledge are all cosmetic. ... If politicians started acting in a way that would give us something to be proud of, maybe kids would be more patriotic."
As an English teacher and a graduate of a Catholic grammar school, high school and college, I am not at all happy about the woeful ignorance of many students about religion. A few days ago when we were talking about one of Falstaff's speeches in Henry the IV Part I, hardly any kids picked up the reference to Lazarus and Dives; when we do T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a fraction of kids understand Eliot's reference to John the Baptist.
Though almost every religion is represented in our wildly diverse student body, most kids are ignorant of the origins and practices of religions different from their own. Kids from various Christian religions know little about Yom Kippur, and few know anything about the Muslim month of Ramadan.
Any educated kid should know, at the very least, the place of religion in history and culture. With proper planning and well-trained teachers, public schools could teach courses in the religions of the world, the kind of courses that many college students are flocking to. That may not satisfy the Christian Coalition, but it is infinitely more promising than such politically motivated tokens as moments of silence, compulsory pledges, postings of "In God We Trust" and the Ten Commandments and whatever else we are likely to be hit with by misguided politicians