I'm German and learned about this via a friend from the US. When they mentioned it, I thought their teacher was a lunatic. Then they told me that this is normal course of action. Just what in the absolute fuck.
It depends on where and when in the US. In areas that are Democratic (the more liberal party) it doesn't really happen much anymore, but in areas that are Republican (the more conservative party) it still happens at the start of every single school day.
Oh yeah, it definitely is in that sense. The point is that patriotism is hard to discern from facism. That they happened to use the same symbol here is just a good illustration of that. Ultimately, the Hitler Salute also started out as a symbol of patriotism before it all turned to genocide.
It's state law where I live IIRC. They force you to say it, because of legal precedent, but the school can apparently get in trouble with the state if they don't say it at the start of the day.
It was always funny when we'd all stand up and only the teachers and maybe three students would say it.
C'mon, don't be ridiculous! If the US was so anti left, Sanders would never make it to become president! We don't want to live in the timeline where the Republicans won the 2016 election because the Democrats didn't dare to send Sanders because he's too far left.
Growing up, for a time my folks were way into the evangelical thing and I attended a totally batshit religious school where we recited 3 pledges back-to-back every morning. To the U.S. flag, the Christian flag and the Bible. Then had to recite entire chapters of the Bible we had per force committed to memory that week. Failure to do so was grounds for savage corporal punishment. No other experience in life so inoculated me against authoritarianism and organized religion. It also let me know at that tender age that sadists existed.
In high school like 15 years ago we not only had the regular pledge, we had to pledge to the Texas state flag. Which you hold out your hand like you are holding something?
"Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible."
It's all hot garbage and unquestioning nationalism. The good bit was, only one teacher ever gave me flack for sitting out the pledge with my little emo ass. And that was my ultra conservative AP US Government teacher. And he was just a nut ball. But when I framed it as my freedom he chilled.
He was still wrong about flat taxes not being regressive!
That's so weird to me. I grew up in an area of Texas that is very red today. We quit both pledges in the 3rd or 4th grade. It's weird that we did it at all, but that was back when they also taught that freedom of the individual was super important and if you didn't like what someone else was doing you could always just look away because it wasn't your fucking business. So they didn't make us do it at a certain point because it was counter to the other shit they said. That was in the years leading up to Ann Richards being voted as governor so that may inform outsiders of what was happening at the time.
There's a lot of problematic shit that happened when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong. But at least they seemed to be headed the right direction at the time with the info we had (that's a whole other ball of garbage that I'm not picking at today...ask me another time when it's not 3am). I had forgotten about both pledges as an adult until someone reminded me a few years ago that it was a thing.
Texas has gotten way more idiotic over the last 30 odd years.