A Pilgrim’s Digression

A middle school teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, has been reassigned to non-instructional duties for burning an American flag in the classroom. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Now consider the rest of the story. The flag-burning was a teaching device intended to enflame emotions prior to beginning a Social Studies assignment on free speech. Still stupid? Or brave?

The safety issue of burning a flag in a classroom trash can is probably enough, in itself, to label this action as stupid. Any teacher who lights an uncontrolled fire in class is probably going to be suspended or reassigned. It just was not a particularly bright thing to do. But it did grab students’ attention, and for that I give him credit.

Stuart sixth-grader Kelsey Adwell, 11, said students were abuzz about the incident yesterday.

“They just can’t believe that a teacher would do that — burn two American flags in front of the class,” she said. “A teacher shouldn’t do that, even though it was an example.”

At least one school board member believes the teachers’ actions went too far, not for safety reasons, but because of potentially offending students: “School board member Pat O’Leary said the flag burning was unnecessary and could have offended some students, including those in military families.”

It probably did offend people. Some parents are apparently calling for the teacher to be fired, so obviously offense was taken. So what? The purpose was not to cause offense, but to provoke thought, as even the school superintendent allows.

Furthermore, using the “offense” argument equates an insult to one’s patriotism with an insult to one’s race, ethnicity, or religion. Sorry, but offending someone’s sense of patriotism is not the same as using a racial epithet, or otherwise insulting someone. If a teacher insulted a race of people in class, as a thought or emotion-provoking act, to me that would be grounds for dismissal no matter the teacher’s motives.

Patriotism is fair game: a patriotic student should be able to defend his or her beliefs against attack, and I see the teacher’s flag-burning as a way of provoking a “fight” response in patriotic students. That means they respond as the teacher wanted them to respond: by writing a thoughtful opinion paper. Not by calling for the teacher’s ouster.

However, all that aside, it was still pretty dumb to light a fire in a classroom (no bad metaphor intended), even if he was standing by with his own fire extinguisher. The only way I see that the experiment could be justified is if the teacher informed administration of his lesson plan (the plan would probably be refused, however) and allowed outsiders to observe the lesson.

Personally, I can think of other, safer ways to desecrate an American flag. I’d put it in a bucket of bleach. Somehow, bleaching all the color out of the flag seems to me as powerful a symbolic statement as setting fire to the flag.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if conservative radio hosts decide to make an issue of this.