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Confederate flag in classroom offers a teaching moment

Teacher Kari Pruett’s page in the Computech Middle School yearbook is decorated with Confederate flags and a Ku Klux Klan symbol. She was asked to remove a Confederate flag from her classroom this year, after a parent complained. The yearbook was reprinted without the offensive symbols.
Teacher Kari Pruett’s page in the Computech Middle School yearbook is decorated with Confederate flags and a Ku Klux Klan symbol. She was asked to remove a Confederate flag from her classroom this year, after a parent complained. The yearbook was reprinted without the offensive symbols. COMPUTECH MIDDLE SCHOOL Submitted to The Bee

The Bee reported on a father’s complaint about a Computech teacher that displayed the Confederate flag, among several others, on the wall of a classroom as a teaching tool. He likened it to the monuments in the South that are being torn down because they cause offense.

Those are separate issues. Monuments are erected to memorialize great people or events. In that context, a Confederate flag flying over a state capitol or elsewhere really is offensive. But this wasn’t memorializing something the teacher thought was great any more than a Holocaust museum is memorializing the greatness of Nazi Germany by displaying Nazi regalia. There’s a difference in a monument and a historical display.

If the sight of the flag offends this man’s daughter, he needs to be a parent and explain to his daughter that some of what she will learn about this world is disturbing and ugly, but that she needs to learn it anyway. How else will she recognize these same offensive symbols as an adult?

Symbols represent ideas. It’s important that students learn about the bad and good symbols and the ideas they represent to become educated voters who can differentiate fascist demagogues from reputable candidates.

Mark Ross, Fresno

This story was originally published June 16, 2017 at 11:25 AM with the headline "Confederate flag in classroom offers a teaching moment."

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