In a recent New York Times essay, Jamelle Bouie considered the accusation–increasingly leveled by the Right–that educators (especially but not exclusively at the university level) “indoctrinate” students.
When I first stumbled across that accusation, I found it ludicrous. As any professor will confirm, teachers are lucky to “indoctrinate” students sufficiently to get them to read the course syllabus. Like so many of the loony-tunes beliefs that have currency on the MAGA Right, this one is prompted by the conviction that no one could really disagree with their perspectives, so if many younger Americans reject their world-view, that rejection must be due to pernicious activity by those hated “libruls.”
As Bouie notes, they’re paranoid. He began his essay with examples:
According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.
“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.
This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”
And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”
As Bouie concedes, ordinary Americans often worry that, as their children find friends and have experiences outside the home, they will adopt ideas that differ from those with which they’ve been raised. But as he says, that is not what we have here. “What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.”
After all, the ideological defection of one’s children couldn’t possibly be attributable to their encounters with reality. It must be a result of nefarious “grooming” and “indoctrination.” As Bouie points out,
To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people….
If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.
These students haven’t been indoctrinated; they’ve encountered reality–facts, evidence and experiences at odds with the beliefs of the cult. As Bouie says, “It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.”
But Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?
Why consider the possibility that you might be wrong about climate change denial, or the government’s right to force a woman to give birth?
In the real world, professors lack the ability to indoctrinate, Jews don’t have space lasers, and liberals don’t control the weather.
The kids are just sane.
The Oxford Dictionary defines indoctrination: “ the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically”. How many of us had the privilege to attend college when a professor laid out a classic assumption to encourage debate? Your argument needed to be succinct and reference a credible published source. I find it interesting that the far right chooses the word ‘indoctrination’. The far right covets their leader who promises to silence their critics.
Wait. Jews don’t have a space laser? Dang, that is inconvenient.
“It is axiomatic to say that which we dislike most in others is often what characterizes us best.” I cannot recall who said this or if I’ve correctly captured the quote but the essence of it captures the entire Republican mindset. It is knee-jerk reaction without thought driven solely by fear and paranoia.
This anti-indoctrination lie is yet another projection from incompetent, corrupt and not-very-smart right-wing politicians and pundits who themselves are working their pathetic asses off indoctrinating cult members. I venture that most of them did poorly in school at some point and/or discovered that there were bucks to made by exploiting the ignorance of others.
When a political entity has no sale-able program, resorting to these idiotic memes, election rigging and outright distortions and lies is all they have left. Pathetic.
I don’t know who said it either, Indygaffer, but it’s called psychological projection, and Sheila just recently shared a post about it. The cult leaders cannot understand why they aren’t attracting more saps into their existing cult. Instead of looking at themselves, they ‘project’ their faults onto others, “The Marxists have infiltrated our schools to indoctrinate our young people.”
It’s called opening young minds to worldly concepts. The scientific method destroys much of what these looney tunes believe, so it must be Satanic. Anybody who questions biblical principles as a way to live must have been introduced to Lucifer’s principles. In other words, the closed-minded conservatives are trying to indoctrinate young people, but they reject it outright.
The higher education you obtain, the more open your mind becomes. Lifelong learners are also introduced to more life concepts that open the mind. If students take one archeological class, they will question the preposterous idea that Adam and Eve were the alpha of all this.
I watched a casual talking point interview with Mitt Romney and Antony Blinken, and they discussed why they’ve lost the narrative that Israel is sacred and can do no wrong. Mitt explained that they had won the propaganda battle for years, but now, with videos coming straight out of Gaza and posted on Telegram, YouTube, and TikTok, they are losing the propaganda war. This is why Biden pressured TikTok to sell to US interests so they could control the narrative again. China is letting young minds see the truth; we can’t have that.
When those young minds protested on campus against genocide and wanted universities to divest anything related to Israel, BOTH parties reacted to crush dissent. They don’t want us questioning USA propaganda! It must be the outside influences like the Chinese or Russians. 😉
“Question everything and anyone.” ~ Socrates
The day that young people stop thinking that there is a better way will be the first day of our descent back into the dark ages.
Todd, The current polarization around Israel is more likely because of Russian influence working to convince Americans that Biden is failing to govern a country thousands of miles away. Like Sheila would say “It’s complicated”.
As for indoctrination, the closest I got in college was a class called “Intellectual History in America” where we covered american history highlighting pre and post enlightenment thinking studying how various groups brought their thinking and how that shaped political and social beliefs of these various groups and the founding fathers. It was the first time in my life I was actually interested and excited to learn about history.
As one teacher commented to me, “If we actually could indoctrinate students, we’d indoctrinate them to read the class material, do their homework, and wear deodorant.”
The idea that the next generation folks might be learning and thinking for themselves is unacceptable, especially if they are coming to different conclusions than the old generation wants them to accept. Obviously it must be evil INDOCTRINATION, which must be countered by censorship and stronger indoctrination.
Dan, there is nothing complicated about the Zionist-controlled Israel. They are the epitome of evil, and Joe Biden, aka Genocide Joe, is a self-declared Zionist. Our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is also there. So is Trump, and so is Harris.
AIPAC controls about 80% of the establishment politicians in Washington. I’ve been blocked chiefly by the Democrats for pointing out how much money they have received from AIPAC. These are the people who gave standing ovations to the criminal mind behind the genocide – Netanyahu.
As I said, there is nothing complicated about Israel’s criminal regime.
Indoctrination is what I got at a fundamentalist, right-wing private grammar school, and I had rejected it by 8th grade: anti-science, anti-female, anti-evolutionary dogma were pushed on us to an extreme degree: “God put the dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith in the Bible…” Please. Even a middle-school kid can see through such nonsense.
“If you are not a liberal at age 25, you have no heart. If you are not a Conservative at age 35, you have no brain.” (Winston Churchill) If we give credence to Winny, it seems as if indoctrination must have been happening for a very long time. Apparently, we needn’t worry about it because it will be gone in 10 years.
By all means – keep the young citizens ignorant so they can be controlled more easily.
Todd, “Zionism is a religious and political movement that brought Jews to their ancient homeland and reestablished Israel as the central location for Jewish identity.” “…epitome of evil…,” is really a bit over the top.
AIPAC, however, is not our friend.
PROJECTION based paranoia, is what these self-blindfolded fools engage in. It’s like “If those kids are not thinking just as I do, it must be the fault of some enemy. My view of reality can not be mistaken! Copernicus? Who the hell was he? What was he thinking? He must be ‘woke!'”
Mitch, just as the US has evil players in the right-wing government (Fascists and Nazis), Israel has the same. As this Rabbi explains, it’s the power-wielding Likud Party Zionists. Many leaders around the world have compared them to the 1930 German Nazis. If you listen to their leaders, they glorify the murder of children and women. I would call that EVIL:
“The Religious Zionists wield their power today in an unholy alliance with the inheritors of yet another stream of Zionism known as Revisionist Zionism. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party represent this lineage. Revisionist Zionism, founded in 1920, believed that the Jewish People had a right to the entire land of Israel — that is, all of British Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan (today’s Kingdom of Jordan.) Revisionists embraced colonialist expansion without apology, arguing that in the realm of statecraft, might makes right. The early Revisionists argued against the Labor Zionists’ Socialist ideals, advocating instead for free markets, violent insurgence towards political goals, and unabashed, amoral state power.” ~ Rabbi Jonathan Kligler
https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/the-right-wing-extremists-are-in-charge-in-israel/
Todd, As for the morals of the Israeli government, I will leave that judgement up to you. But, you have fallen into the trap thinking that anybody can tell another person or entity what to do and they will do it. You also ignore the fact that if we cut the weapons supply, Israel will just cozy up to some other foreign entity and maybe one that is not friendly to the US. In addition, what little influence the US does have will be non-existent.
I will reiterate that you have fallen into the thinking most likely seeded by Russian propaganda and firmly embraced by the pro-Putin wing of the US government, the Republican party. I won’t disagree that we have many questionable special interest groups activity undermining the best interests of the US for their own gain, but like I said before. It’s complicated and it’s not as black and white as you would like to think.
Zionism is a supremacist ideology. Period. It’s an anachronism. An ideology for primitive people confined within the colonizing frame of mind.
It appeals to segregationists. Israel is a theocracy.
We get it. Dan Mullendore hates Arabs. Zionist apologists support genocide. Who would Dan Mullendore wish to exterminate next?
Todd. You haven’t been blocked or you wouldn’t be inflicting your twisted world view on us every day. You are perfectly free to plunge down your rabbit hole and try to pull us in after you. Don’t blame the government if we don’t choose to follow you.
I too remember learning about everything surrounding the Enlightenment at my college first semester history class, taught by an inspirational professor who truly cared about his subject and our progress under his tutelage. That one class reflected a very significant leap from the small conservative town I grew up in. I would guess that the Project 2025 folks would consider any liberal arts education which dares to include the profound effects of the Enlightenment to be antithetical to their world view. To me it only exposed what to me to be the unnatural order of things (i.e., celibacy?), allowing the freedom to think accordingly.