School children offered to wipe their feet with the American flag in English class
School children offered to take down the American flag in English class on Opening Day and wipe their feet with it
The dim teacher responded that even she had thought about doing it
I will remember my daughter’s first day of school this year for a long time. Because of my busy schedule I couldn’t call her until after lunch. When I got in touch with her, I asked her how classes were going, if there were any new students in class, and who her teacher was.
She answered: “Papa, when we went into the classroom, one girl asked: ‘why is the US flag hanging on the wall? We should tear it down and wipe our feet on it.’”
Another classmate of my daughter voiced her support for the girl.
The flag hung in the classroom because it was an English class. Whether she was serious or not, the teacher responded to the students in an absolutely absurd way: “I myself have thought about tearing down that flag from the wall.”
After thinking about it for a while, my daughter said, “Papa, I didn’t know how to react! Why do I have to deal with these politics?” She had long gotten used to the American flag, standing on our table among ten other souvenir flags from countries I’ve visited. And she had long known that in history and politics, things are rarely black and white. Everything has shades of grey.
Most likely, these children’s parents missed the moment when their children turned into little führers by watching propaganda on local TV channels with them. After all, not every adult can understand the difference between the truth and when it is being twisted.
But the fact remains that these children brought such nonsense to school and voiced it in front of the whole class, and the fact that the teacher didn’t take them down made me very sad.
At the end, the children might as well have wiped their feet on their iPhones and computers. They might as well have completely abandoned the study of the enemy’s language, and then at a crucial moment this teacher would be out of work. Of course, in college the teacher studied not only English language, but also culture and the history of English-speaking countries. She knows that historically in the USA there were more than a few rebels who publicly burned and trampled the flag of her own country during protests. But when Russian children want to do this without a care about politics, the adults are to blame, with stupid games that they blindly imitate. The teacher gets paid her salary and because of that how could she take such a narrow view during lessons and thereby expand the children’s horizons, teaching students to analyze appearance and facts and not become such blunt sweeping xenophobes.
Vasiliy Yashkinas
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