You earlier said yourself that there is always some level of indoctrination so I don't know how you could be against all of it. Basically anything you teach a child outside of hard facts is indoctrination. Anything regarding morality.
I am against most indoctrination in public schools. I dont see any real harm with the pledge. America is a great country so what is wrong with patriotism? You arent forced to love your country ever. In fact is any child forced to say the pledge? At most you just have to stand up and shut up.
That's what's interesting about indoctrination. A well indoctrinated person would argue they were not indoctrinated until they ran out of breath. A perfect example of this is you being against most indoctrination in schools but OK with the pledge. The pledge is without question the most blatant and egregious act of indoctrination the school and government engage in. And no one will have an issue with it, because they also said it a couple thousand times before they turned 18.
Think about it. Every Day. In unison. Every student stands. A special moment carved out every day just for this. They openly recite a pledge of allegiance. Everyone sees everyone else doing it. You make a pledge to your
wife once. Maybe twice if you renew your vows. But to your country- every school day for 13 years.
My fascination with the pledge began while living and working abroad for 20 years. 7 different countries in Europe. Not Military. Corporate work.
I was in a primary school in Scotland one morning with a colleague. I said to her, 'This is cool, I'll get to hear a different 'pledge of allegiance'. She looked at me and said, WTF is a 'pledge of allegiance'. So I explained it all to her. She looked at me like I was a founding member of the Branch Davidians. I just chalked it up to cultural differences and moved on with my life. But none of the other countries I worked in had a pledge of allegiance either.
I started looking into it a little more. Turns out not a ton of countries have a pledge of allegiance. And a lot of the ones that do are not good company.
So that is when I started spending a lot more time trying to understand indoctrination. And you are right. It's pretty hard to go through your life and not be indoctrinated, or indoctrinate someone else, in something. So I try to pay special attention to ritualized activities that are repeated frequently. Those are often the most blatant and effective types of indoctrination. For almost an entire nation to lose their shit over a dude kneeling during a song, you must have millions upon millions of heavily indoctrinated people.
You will never see me out with a picket sign trying to eradicate the pledge or anything like that. And I have never told my kids not to say the pledge. As my older one got to 5th grade or so, I started to share some of what I learned, and encouraged her to investigate and come to her own conclusions. Which is precisely what I told her to do with religion as well. The younger one still has a few more years to go before we can have that chat.
