Should children be forced to stand and say the Pledge of Allegience?

[bewitched]

Originally Posted by Strangler Lewis

Yes, there is much to rebel against in the pledge. One can imagine disaffected southerners chafing against the "one nation" and "liberty and justice for all" parts.

Hmmm, there is the whole "God" thing; especially distasteful when you don't believe in God and your pledge to a nation "under God" is all but compulsory. And that whole pledging an oath of allegiance. We find oaths of allegiances and citizenship papers to be distasteful in many other nations and yet we don't recognize the distastefulness of our own "oath" because ours is not strictly compulsory. I will grant you that the Pledge is not required by our government but schools have often made it compulsory. And even in schools where it is not compulsory, peer pressure (and approval/disapproval from adults) is a strong force in compelling conformity.

We would do well to replace the pledge with scouting oaths, since they tend to focus on service and not merely loyalty. However, it shouldn't be too hard to teach kids that the pledge is aspirational and not merely a statement of entitlement.

I agree that a focus on service might be less distasteful (depending upon what is meant by service) than loyalty. Nonetheless, even the GS oath pledges service to God and country. The BS oath requires one to pledge to do their "duty towards God" and the YMCA oath requires you to state that you "pledge before God...." I would not be thrilled with any one of these being substituted as a national oath.

In any case, if dd decides at any point that she doesn't want to recite the Pledge, for whatever reason, I will support that. I would rather her respectfully protest a status quo with which she doesn't agree than to continue to engage in a recitation of an oath because peer pressure and her elders deem it a requirement.

Personally, "under God" aside, I remember the Pledge making me feel proud as a child...but that was also a time when I bought the fiction that we were a nation "chosen" by God and therefore morally superior to all other nations. As an adult, I could take it or leave it. I respectfully stand, but don't recite the Pledge. There's no big reason that I can pinpoint why I felt the need to stop (surely my refutation of the existence of God had something to do with it), but I do know that the stopping has never affected nor reflected my proudness (is that a word?) of or disappointment in our nation.