This is not a form of brainwashing.

[Courtesy Flush]

[Mnemosyne]

1. Thank you, CF! Wow, a more truthful pledge will never be heard in schools. n/t

[saras]

2. It's moving pictures of things that aren't here. Of course it's a form of brainwashing.

[Proles]

3. I remember when I was in kindergarten when we first recited the pledge.

I had no idea what the words meant, or what the underlying meaning of the pledge even was, but it sort of became an obsessive compulsive ritual that I recited through at least the 7th grade.

After a while I sort of became irritated that I had been saying the pledge hundreds of times since I was 5, that I simply stopped saying the pledge, and merely stood up to look at the flag out of a general respect. By then, several other students did the same, and the teachers didn't really seem to care either way. It was just a mindless ritual after all.

But I remember when I was in the 5th grade (this was when I was living in Texas), us students had just finished some morning activity in the library, and we were walking through the hallways back to class. Well, it just so happened that the pledge was being recited over the intercom, and none of the students stopped in the middle of the hallway to say the pledge.

Well, when we got back to our class, a group of teachers gathered in front of us looking furious. They berated us on how none of us stopped in the middle of the hallway to say the pledge, and how the soldiers or revolutionaries or whatever died for us to have the freedom to express ourselves (kind of ironic looking back). They made each of us write a paper explaining how sorry we were. I can't remember what I wrote; I think it was just some basic cookie-cutter paper on how I was sorry, and how the soldiers were brave or something. In retrospect, I probably would have wrote about the idiocy of the whole situation.

[suzanner]

4. Isn't some sort of patriotic pledge recited in most every other country?

I was a Girl Scout back when. We said a pledge. As for the 'Pledge of allegiance". I don't remember looking at it as brainwashing, but as a reminder that we're all in this together; we're able to work as one unit in that 12 seconds of reciting. But then, the stuff 'for which we stand' was not a schism like it is today. We all knew what the right stuff was. Anyway,what would people rather have kids memorize?

[Courtesy Flush]

5. If you thought of it as brainwashing

It wouldn't be brainwashing.