Rosen: Liberals fly their colors

Published September 8, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Opinion Columns & Blogs

It was two years ago that North High School was the center of controversy over a foreign flag. A Mexican flag was given equal prominence with an American flag in a permanent wall display in the school lobby and in a social studies classroom. The teacher who hung the Mexican flag in his classroom said he wanted his students to feel welcome. This was a nice sentiment, but a direct violation of Colorado law.

Although North High is almost 85 percent Hispanic, this is still an American school in the United States, funded by U.S. taxpayers. It's not a joint venture of the U.S. and Mexican governments; nor is this corner of Denver a Mexican colony.

Just recently, there was another flag flap, this time at Carmody Middle School in Jefferson County. Eric Hamlin, a geography teacher, gave equal prominence in his classroom to the flags of the United States, Mexico, China and the United Nations. Understandably more sensitive to Colorado law in the wake of the North High incident, administrators at Carmody instructed Hamlin to remove the foreign flags. He refused and was suspended for insubordination. After a few days, a compromise was reached, all was forgiven and permission was granted to display the foreign flags on a "temporary" basis as a learning tool, consistent with a specified exception in the state statute.

Although he was invited to return, Hamlin has since asked to be reassigned to another school. The controversy quickly faded, but there's much to be learned from this episode, which raises some bigger policy questions.

It's not about banning foreign flags. Under the law they can be conditionally displayed. But Hamlin is a microcosm, the product of an educratic mind-set with a decidedly liberal political and social agenda that pervades our public schools.

He said he was concerned that by giving special treatment to the U.S. flag, "we're sending the message that America is No. 1, everything else is below that." Of course we are! Hamlin might disapprove, but I suspect most Americans want precisely that message to be sent in our government schools.

Hamlin said displaying the flags of other nations promotes "tolerance," one of the themes of his course. "The flags should be able to celebrate diversity," he added. This is a fashionable term in educratic circles these days, a first cousin to "cultural relativism" and "moral equivalence."

Perhaps you remember a recent controversy involving another geography teacher, Jay Bennish, who subjected his Overland High School students to a tirade attacking President Bush, America's sordid past and our capitalist economic system. All this in a geography class, mind you. Toleration - and nonjudgmentalism, apparently - is reserved only for other nations. It's impolite to speak harshly of brutal regimes like North Korea, Cuba and Iran, but America is fair game.

We've had this debate before over the treatment of patriotism in our schools. Patriotism: love of country - our country. That doesn't mean blind obeisance. You can teach about our misdeeds without obsessing about them. The point is: Americans have so much more about which to be proud than ashamed. And that's exactly how it ought to be presented in our schools.

Years ago, I remember taking a world geography test in school. The teacher gave us a blank map, and we had to fill in the names of the countries. It was only part of the test, but it was a way of learning geographical context. It's a good start. Too many Americans today are geographically illiterate. We learn world geography by crisis. When a natural disaster strikes or war breaks out in some trouble spot, we only then discover its whereabouts on the globe - especially if U.S. troops are involved.

The trouble with the teaching of world geography in schools today is that the discipline is too full of itself. It's overreaching. And in trying to do too much, it does too little. It's unreasonable to expect Hamlin's delightful but callow seventh-graders to digest geopolitics, world history, religion, culture and comparative political and economic systems in a short, middle-school semester - and make any sense of it. How many teachers are qualified to present all this? If at the end of the school year, the kids can't at least fill in the names on that blank map, the course has failed.

Hamlin believed he was standing on principle. He disapproves of the Colorado law that subordinates foreign flags to ours. That's his opinion. And it was his prerogative to disobey the law and his superiors as long as he's willing to take the consequences. But he's only one government employee, and these kinds of policy decisions are made above his pay grade by administrators, superintendents and school boards ultimately responsible to the people whose elected representatives made these laws.

Mike Rosen's radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA. He can be reached by e-mail at mikerosen@850koa.com.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News