New School Year, New Pledge of Allegiance?

When students head back to the classroom in just a few weeks, they'll start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance — a tradition that goes back generations.

In Wisconsin, as is the case with most states, classrooms in public schools are required to offer the pledge or the National Anthem daily, but students are not required to actually stand up and recite it. Most do, of course, but some students object to the phrase "Under God" and refuse to take part in the daily routine.

Students are required to say the pledge, but should they be? Patch posed the question to users over the last few days and received a flurry of feedback.

"If you live, breathe, work and are educated in America, you owe your allegiance to America," Carolyn Tyler wrote on the Greenfield Patch Facebook page. "There were more loving, kind, patriotic people when we grew up reciting the pledge of allegiance who respected their parents, their community, their schools and humanity. What's wrong with it? How could reciting the pledge harm anyone? America - Honor and love it or leave it!"

"I don't want my kids to have to say anything," Chris Wenger wrote on the Oak Creek Patch Facebook page. "I would hope they would WANT to make the decision to say it on their own."

The issue has surfaced nationally. Earlier this year, a state lawmaker in Arizona introduced a bill to require students to recite the pledge. Other states, including Oregon and Nebraska, have had discussions on whether to require the pledge to be recited in schools.

For three decades, the pledge read as it does today, without the controversial phrase, “Under God.” But in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for Congress to add the phrase to combat communist threats, leaving Americans with the 31-words we have today:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

So, should students be required to recite it?

"My kids do in Oak Creek," Becky O'Brien wrote. "More schools would if they took God out of it. Restore it to the original pledge and there wouldn't be a problem. It was written without the word God for a reason. This country wasn't built on religion."

"As in forced to do so? No," Steve Morschauser wrote. "That would run contrary to the very concept behind the basis of our country. Freedom can be painful for some to watch and ponder."

Patch blogger Lyle Ruble opened up this heated discussion of saying the pledge in a blog post that garnered more than 250 comments back in December.

“Only the discussion of abortion gets more emotive attention; but the role of religion in our schools and classrooms has been a sure fire prescription for heated conflict,” Ruble wrote.