cómo decir apuro
Nampa Girl Silent for Pledge of Allegiance
By Jennifer Gelband, 1-23-07
There’s a young lady in Nampa that one who still uses the word would call a whippersnapper.
Chandra Carlson, a fifth grader at Centennial Elementary, will not recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school. That’s not entirely correct; she will say it in English, but she won’t say it in the additionally requisite Spanish and German.
“We said the Pledge of Allegiance in English and then started saying it in Spanish so I sat down,” Chandra told KBCI News of her decision last week.
The reason, according to Chandra’s father Brian Bucholtz, is that she doesn’t know what the words mean, likening it to a “bouncing ball on a prompter.” And by doing it that way, the meaning is lost.
Whether Chandra intended to send a political message at all is uncertain, but one was clearly received. This was an invitation for folks from the English-only side to revisit their plight and laud the girl. “If I had a ‘Patriot for Vasquez’ award I would give it to her,” former Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez told the station in another story. Vasquez was part of the movement to adopt an English-only rule that applies to all official documents in Canyon County.
The English-only argument is a slippery slope. Sure, it appears people in Nampa like the idea of homogenizing – or making consistent – the structure of county paperwork. But is that a very good rule to apply to schools?
No matter the result of pleading the White House to make English the national language, school is for learning. In most schools kids study foreign languages for a number of reasons, one of which being that we live in an increasingly accessible global society and English will never be a global language. Another being that studying foreign languages helps students better understand English – a Latin background unquestionably aids high school juniors taking the verbal portion of the SAT and learning how to conjugate nouns in Russian instills an understanding of the oft-misused nominative, genitive and dative cases.
If Chandra is reciting the foreign versions of the short pledge that she just deliver in English, she probably does understand the words, even a little. So maybe that isn’t really the story.
What if Chandra decided to not participate because she has a hard time rolling her R’s? What if she is saving her voice for choir practice?
Whatever the reason, Chandra – who was asked to stand even if not reciting the pledge – is now as locally controversial as that girl at South Jr. High who dyed her hair green fifteen years ago. Her story made it to Oprah; now that’s whippersnappery.
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ego vexillum
unitorum statuorum americae....
Here I thought there was some problem with the Pledge per se (figuring no one in Nampa would merely object to the godless menace-era "under God" addendum).
I think it's a fine thing for youngsters to learn the pros and cons of opting out of corporate activities, whether out of atheism, general contrariness, or even misguided linguistic jingoism. You don't want to learn mathematics, or history, or Chinese, or Spanish? Well, we can't make you, anymore than we can make you capable of competing in a world economy.
If we really loved our children, and our temporarily superior place in the world, we would require competence in at least one "foreign" language as a prerequisite for completion of the period of mandatory education.
Taking a stand (or seat) for principle is great. Taking a stand for ignorance is just stupid.
I agree with Tom in the above comment, though. Taking a stand or seat for ignorance is just plain stupid. And, while some could make the point that reciting the pledge in another language may not build real understanding of the language, it is way too small a thing to make a stink about.