“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.”
Hearing the pledge being delivered on the daily school-wide announcements was quite unusual. There were confused faces around me as I sat in my third-period astronomy class, all looking at each other as a few stood up.
Since I moved to the United States only about three years ago, I was unfamiliar with what the pledge represented or why it was recited, so I found myself looking up what it means. What I discovered is that the Pledge of Allegiance is a thirty-one word patriotic promise of loyalty to the United States and its flag.
I began to wonder why hearing these words had made me uncomfortable. Even before the start of my discomfort, hearing the pledge made me think about the bigger question of what it means to belong to a nation in the first place.
The very idea of borders seemed very strange to me. There is something peculiar about dividing one continuous planet into countries; drawing invisible lines only seen on paper; and then attaching identities, superiority, privileges, and limitations to those lines. Geography does create natural variation, but the earth itself does not announce where one country ends and another begins, does it? Yet, humans have constructed borders beyond just geographic ones so thoroughly that which side of a line you are on can determine where you belong, what rights you possess, and how you are perceived by others.
Hearing the pledge invited me to think about more than just an American tradition. The question is not about reciting it, but about the certainty embedded in its words, a certainty that seemed to overlook a far more complicated reality of a nation, its borders, the people who live in them, and, arguably most importantly, the equal treatment and freedom of those people.
Its language is not inherently objectionable. In fact, “liberty and justice for all” sounds like an admirable ideal. My curiosity lies not in the words themselves but in the tender space between the ideal and our reality. The word all is beautifully absolute, holding a promise that leaves no one behind. If liberty and justice truly belong to everyone, then those principles must extend beyond the patriotic language recited in school announcements and into the lived experience of every individual.
This intersection of ideals and reality is explored in Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he reflects on how unjust systems of inequality can dehumanize people and limit a person’s ability to fully exercise their humanity and experience freedom. Two children can sit beneath the same classroom lights, learn the same lesson, and be told to dream just as freely, while one goes home to security and the other wonders how to get food on the table. Although the promise is the same, history has made starting grounds profoundly unequal.
I think this contradiction between aspirations and lived realities must be acknowledged in schools. A school isn’t merely just a place where a student learns what the teacher teaches; learning also happens from what we see and hear. The students sitting in the classroom are growing into their perspectives and shaping institutions around them. When a state law asks for the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited daily, even if it says that participation is entirely voluntary, it creates a moment of engagement where students must navigate their own choices in participation. Some students may choose to participate in the recitation simply because they see their peers doing so, instead of examining the meaning of the action. In this light, it seems equally important to teach students not only to repeat and respect a nation’s ideals but also to stay curious and critical. Maybe we should make asking questions a law?
Perhaps this is what interests me most is the gap between language and reality, between belonging to a place and being unquestioningly loyal to it. After all, what does it truly mean to be loyal? If a school is one of the places where society passes on its ideas and ideals, then what else are we inheriting without even realizing it?
Only when these words become a lived experience for everyone do we truly fulfill the geography of that promise.
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