Possibly, with all of the concentrate on exposing college students to hot-button cultural points, there’s simply no room within the fashionable American classroom for classes on Flag Day — Tuesday’s annual nationwide celebration of the Stars and Stripes.
A brand new examine from the homework studying platform Brainly says greater than 30% of youngsters don’t know the American flag has 50 stars representing the nation’s 50 states.
The survey launched forward of the annual vacation — which recollects the day in 1777 when the US authorised the design for its first nationwide flag — additionally finds that 53.2% of center and highschool college students don’t talk about Flag Day of their colleges. However greater than 35% need to be taught extra about it.
James Grossman, government director of the American Historic Affiliation, says the vacation may matter much less at the moment than the flag’s components and “how they imply various things to totally different individuals.”
“Maybe the flag is greatest considered not by way of college students memorizing info about it, however as a supply of considerate questions in a historical past or civics class,” Mr. Grossman mentioned in an e-mail Monday. “What ought to the weather of the flag signify? Why?”
Wilfred M. McClay, a historian at Hillsdale Faculty, says U.S. historical past lessons have more and more “discouraged” a concentrate on the flag as an emblem of the nation’s freedoms whereas emphasizing the constitutional proper to burn it.
“For the flag is our strongest image of what makes us one individuals. We shouldn’t be shocked if our neglect of it can have severe penalties for our cohesion as a nation,” Mr. McClay mentioned Monday.
This 12 months’s Flag Day comes amid a contentious nationwide debate over whether or not U.S. public colleges ought to form college students’ opinions on controversial political points or stick with the info of studying, writing and arithmetic.
Spurred on by parental rights teams, Republican lawmakers have promoted parental rights in schooling legal guidelines in states starting from Florida to Oklahoma to take away “divisive ideas” from the classroom.
These ideas embody classes on gender id for young children, discussions of systemic racism within the nation’s historical past and “woke math” textbooks that use examples from each in phrase issues.
Robert Gmeiner, an economist at Methodist College in North Carolina, says the American flag is a controversial image of racism and sexism for individuals who promote these classes.
He factors for example to the pushback of progressive activists in opposition to Nike’s Betsy Ross sneakers, which featured the nation’s unique flag with 13 stars in a circle to signify the 13 colonies that fashioned the US.
“It was taken as an emblem of slavery,” Mr. Gmeiner mentioned.
Though most colleges are out for summer time break every June 14, a trainer helped develop the annual vacation, also referred to as Nationwide Flag Day.
Wisconsin trainer Bernard J. Cigrand urged his college students in 1885 to watch the date as “Flag Birthday.” His need to honor the flag led him to jot down an article in a Chicago newspaper.
As regional celebrations unfold, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as Flag Day in 1916 and Congress completely established the vacation in 1949.
Regardless of that historical past, solely 45% of the scholars who responded to Brainly’s survey knew that the unique American flag contained 13 stars.
The survey additionally discovered that simply 16% of respondents appropriately knew that the pink, white, and blue colours signify valor, purity, and justice. Greater than 59% of the others incorrectly claimed it represented freedom, equality, and justice for all.
Colleen Sheehan, a professor within the Faculty of Civic and Financial Thought and Management at Arizona State College, says the survey reveals colleges might do a greater job educating the flag to college students.
“The American flag reminds of us what America stood for on the time of our founding. It reminds of us of the work we’ve got but to do at the moment to reside as much as that imaginative and prescient, that concept captured within the phrase ‘America,’” Ms. Sheehan mentioned Monday.
