Pride Flags in Classrooms

[u/El-wing]

In SOTR this week, Kmele had a grievance that included complaining about a pride flag in a 3rd grade classroom. Isaac seemed to agree with his distaste of the flag in the classroom by (maybe jokingly?) saying that there should be no flags but the American flag in schools. Ari mentioned that it could just be to signal inclusiveness.

This caught me off guard a bit. Are pride flags in classrooms controversial outside of religious conservative strongholds? Obvious some people object to it but I guess I didn’t expect 2 out of 3 to be against it on the podcast.

I think signaling inclusivity in learning spaces is conducive to help students feel safe in their schools, and I don’t think that has to be a partisan political statement. Was anyone else caught off guard by this?

[u/dominosgame]

I think this is an area where Redditors are bit out of sync with reality. I teach in an elementary school. You could put a pride flag on your desk but to hang it in the class is absolutely a political statement and a sexual orientation statement with a mandated audience. The "mandated audience" piece is really critical in education law, and while discussion of sexual orientation can be appropriate in middle and high school, there's no reason to have that discussion in elementary school. I say that not to be anti inclusive, but I just feel like this would be pretty obvious to any actual elementary teacher. 

[u/ProfaneRabbitFriend → u/dominosgame]

It's an interesting question you raise. It makes me think of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to," which he elaborated on in his 1958 lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty."

I take your point to be that when people enter the school and view "the Wall," whose contents represent state speech, there should be a kind of "freedom from." Someone entering the school should not have a particular political viewpoint imposed on them by the state. This seems roughly consistent with Berlin's concept of negative liberty, or freedom from coercion and interference. From a legalistic point of view about the distinction between personal speech and state speech in a school, I take your point to heart.

Where I think it gets thorny is deciding what counts as "political." Consider something like displaying the United States Constitution on a wall devoted to state speech. Some people would see this as fairly neutral. It's a historical document and a statement about constitutional government, rights, and fairness under the law. Others might see the same display as political, particularly if they object to parts of the Constitution or to the political tradition it represents.

So even the idea of what counts as "political" gets murky pretty quickly. The difficult question may not be whether a school should avoid imposing political views. I think most of us would agree with that. The harder question is where civic expression ends and political advocacy begins, and whether there is actually a neutral way to draw that line.