Justice Jackson spinning in his grave

Read a curious story in today's Washington Post about a suburban Washington DC school that recently used school resource police officers to escort a student out of a classroom for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Clearly this teacher has never heard of the Pledge of Allegiance cases of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Justice Jackson wrote the majority opinion in the West Virginia case that ruled schools could not mandate that students said the pledge. The most compelling argument Jackson makes is as follows

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

I have been teaching for eight years and only once have I had a student consistently refuse to say the pledge. The year was 2004/05 and when I asked her privately why she chose not to stand for the pledge she told me that it was her silent dissent against the Iraq war, which at the time was spiraling out of control. Her peers never directly challenged her on her beliefs or actions.

The teacher in question should be forced to apologize to the student and be made to write the highlighted sentence from the Jackson opinion 100 times on the dry erase board.