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It will thus be interesting to watch the Pledge as we reinvent and remake our school system. In a recent dispute over the virtues of homeschooling, for instance, a Washington Post editorial, “Parent Says Some Things Can’t Be Taught at Home,” prompted one traditional public school mother to write that her son in kindergarten was “learning to be part of [a] group, raise his hand to be heard, say the Pledge of Allegiance, wait quietly during a moment of silence and so much more.” Can’t do that at home.

Or can you? Some homeschooling parents (and there are now over a million in the United States, and the number is growing as online learning takes off), recognizing that the Pledge offers something irreplaceable, do recite it at home. “Each morning when it’s time to go to school,” reported the Pasco (Washington) Times, “the Seal children gather around the dining room table. Their mother leads them in morning prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the studies begin promptly at 8 a.m.” So deep is our cultural association of the Pledge and school, that recitation of the words can have the effect of turning a dining room into a classroom. But how enforceable is it? Principals can peek into classrooms to make sure their teachers and students are conforming. Who will be looking into our dining rooms? Will the Pledge disappear in the same manner that it took hold?

Let’s recall for a moment that when the editors of the Youth’s Companion first hatched the idea of a celebration of America’s founder, Christopher Columbus, they promoted the quadracentennial as a celebration of American schooling itself. A brilliant marketing strategy—what member of Congress would oppose schoolchildren reciting a patriotic oath?—such joining of the Pledge and schools also placed patriotism at the heart of public education at a time when public education was still a remarkably decentralized institution. (New York State, for instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had ten thousand autonomous school districts; today, with ten times the population, it has a little more than seven hundred. America’s attachment to state and local autonomy is a serious one. Though today, our public school system seems “national” in scope and we are debating “national standards,” we should recall that Thomas Jefferson’s proposal for a “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” as part of the revision of Virginia’s laws in 1779 was largely defeated. “Despite his distrust of central authority,” writes E. D. Hirsch, “Jefferson encouraged the devising of a common curriculum in order that ‘the great mass of the people’ should be taught not just the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also that ‘their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history,’ as well as ‘the first elements of morality.’ ”

And though Bellamy managed to gather a nationwide consensus for his Pledge, there were still plenty of members of Congress who were adamant about the federal government not paying for it. And we can gain a better appreciation of Bellamy’s feat knowing how autonomous the thousands of schools in the United States were. It was the beginning of the creation of a national identity for the industrial age, at its most basic level: through the nation’s children. And Bellamy offered just twenty-three words; an amazingly easy way to patriotism.*

With the exponential growth of homeschooling and its kissing cousin online learning, things could change dramatically for our Pledge.† But for now millions of American children, standing in classrooms across the country and as yet unacquainted with words like “allegiance” and “indivisible” are still repeating the phrases. It is one of the first extended quotations a child will learn—and remember for life. So ingrained from childhood is it that those of us who haven’t recited the Pledge in years can pull it up from some primal memory cortex. Not long ago, a