Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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The boy whom she had now expelled had refused to salute the flag. He was a Socialist, and believed that the flag stood for capitalism. Miss Andrus sent for him, and stormed at him; he was a Russian Jew, and she knew his kind from her experience at Hull House. They were dirty, rotten scoundrels; they were people with no ideals and no country; they were cheap material, who could not be made into good citizens and were not entitled to an education. Miss Andrus tried her best to get young Alpert to name some of the teachers who had encouraged him in his ideas; the boy was threatened with immediate dismissal if he refused to name them, but in spite of the fact that he had “no ideals,” he stood firm! Finally he was given three days in which to make up his mind and salute the flag.

Then—so the boy explained to me—one of his teachers labored with him, explaining to him that he was under a misapprehension about the flag. To be sure it was used by capitalism at the present time, but that was only because it had been stolen; in reality the flag stood for the highest ideals ever conceived by mankind, and it was our business to preserve it for those ideals, and to take it away from the exploiters and rascals. Alpert agreed to that, and went back to Miss Andrus and told her that he had realized his mistake, and that he was now ready to salute the flag as she required. But she declared that he was a hypocrite and a coward, and should not stay in the school. I went to a friend of mine, a wealthy man who happens to be a liberal. He called up a member of the school board, who went to see Miss Andrus; so in two or three days the boy was restored to school, from which he has since been graduated.