I used to say the Pledge in class every morning. Ideologically, it didn’t alter anything. Back when I was eleven, after reading most of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I pointedly refused to stand for the star spangled banner, outraging my classmates and teachers. My father, back then already very left wing, managed to talk me out of it with a more penetrating interpretation of the last stanza “oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,” as being a call for moral introspection, whether or not America was still “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and after considering his insight, I relented. But the experience of being in the minority and refusing to conform based on (half-baked) principals did more for developing my personal courage than mere conformity ever would have.
Two years later, I went to a hippy-dippy artsy-fartsy school, and started wearing a yarmulke and blessing my food in Hebrew before eating it, etc., and that rocked the boat much more, but I stood my ground again. Had I not been a rebellious little commie when I was younger, I would not have become an orthodox Jewish man. The hippy-dippy lures of free sex and drugs in that school would have totally destroyed me. But I learned to push back against a tyrannical majority in first one setting, and then in another. So, yes, saying the Pledge every morning was a good thing, because it have taught my adolescent self how to march to a different drummer, and to conform only when it made sense to do so, thanks to my father’s words of wisdom, not to rebel just for its own sake.