Pointlessly reciting anything serves no purpose.
Oh, there certainly
is a purpose! If you want brainwashed patriots you gotta get started when they're young.
That's exactly why military drafts target teenagers. Old enough to handle armaments, not old enough to know better.
Teaching young kids a rhyme or a Pledge or a Christmas carol or the Lord's Prayer or WHATEVER does not stop their brains from developing. It's ridiculous to presume it does. As you grow up, your understanding of the words and concepts changes, just like revisiting a favorite book from when you were ten. It will look quite a bit different as an adult.
I don't think the Pledge did ANY of the stuff you allege, but .... I did look into the Pledge a bit, and learned that it's writer was a nasty nativist and xenophobe who was attempting to elucidate an "American" WASP platform to counteract all the foreigners hitting our shores and ruining our culture, etc. There's a good but depressing article by WaPo on it.
The Pledge itself, though, isn't hateful. Maybe we don't need it. Making a big deal out of it sure will only make the issue worse.
I didn't know we were the only country that had such a thing. That's interesting. But it is unfair to say people can't think sensibly about their country or their government or its place in the world because we recited it as kids.
Whoa. I didn't say it "stops their brains from developing" nor did I say it's "hateful".
What I'm saying is that it's systemic
indoctrination, which is why it's injected into those as-young-as-possible minds, because that age is maximum
fear factor. That way you cut the emotional knife deeper --- ideally deep enough that they won't dare challenge that "sacred" object. Which brings in the other thing I said, that it's a fetishism prayer. Again, that's indoctrinated at the youngest possible age for the same reason. And that's deliberately undermining critical thought by indoctrinating a Mob Mentality.
Exactly one hundred years ago a citizen in Montana was cornered by a mob of that same mentality who demanded that he bend down and kiss the flag. He refused the mob, and as a result HE --- not the mob but the citizen --- was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in prison.
For defying the mob. That is why I have a problem with mob mentality and its teaching lemmings that "don't you dare think for yourself; ve haf vays of making you follow ze script".
But yes we're the only nation that demands a prayer to its own flag, and somebody else already posted the original way it was saluted, which was quietly done away with because Hitler's fascist salute so closely emulated it. That was a bit too close for comfort but close enough we could have learned that the body posture wasn't the only thing it had in common.
It is the height of irony that a nation supposedly founded on religious freedom, then turns around and demands its citizens must murmur a cult prayer to its own flag fetish.
