ANALYSIS: Indoctrination or Education?
We are utterly failing at knowing the difference. Silencing the voices of those who can teach us will only worsen our collective ignorance.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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My sociology class is small, and early in the year my lessons on the great thinkers of this social science — Auguste Comte, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim — drew more blank stares and yawns than questions about the revolutionary approach to studying society each thinker created.
Their boredom is surely linked to the subject matter — my own eyes glazed over the first time I encountered these thinkers. But it is also linked to their inability to make a connection between themselves and these thinkers.
My class is majority-minority, as well as multi-faith. Those four thinkers are white, European, and from Christian traditions.
The same was mostly true last year when I taught this course at James Monroe High School, and that sparked a change this past summer in my approach.
This year, I made the decision not to simply dedicate a class, or part of a class, to W.E.B. DuBois — one of the greatest sociologists America has produced — where we talk about the books he wrote and reduce his thought to four or five bullet points. Instead, I decided to dedicate an entire quarter to reading his classic study of racism in America — The Souls of Black Folks.
This move has also sparked questions that I’ve had to wrestle with. Was I delivering a quality education, or “radical indoctrination”? Was I offering valid reading material, or a book that could be interpreted as an early advocate of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion before anyone knew what that acronym was?
Another Culture War Gone Sideways
This question, and more like it, now confront teachers here in our region thanks to the “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” Executive Order recently signed by President Trump, and the Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity EO.
Though the first deals with what is taught in classrooms, and the second deals mostly with the application of DEI programs in the federal government, the two are linked both in the Executive Orders themselves, as well as in the minds of everyday people who often use “indoctrination” and “DEI” interchangeably in public discourse.
This issue has particular pertinence in our region, as Spotsylvania County has been for the past several years at the epicenter of the debate about education vs. indoctrination.
Indeed, Gov. Glenn Youngkin was often in the county when the then-conservative-dominated school board was pushing book bans and demanding parents be allowed to overwrite curricula they deemed “indoctrinating.”
Youngkin would not publicly insert himself into the conversation in Spotsylvania, but as governor he was running a “tip line” to allow parents to anonymously “out” teachers they believed were teaching “divisive” ideas. And his Executive Order No. 1 took aim at “divisive concepts” like Critical Race Theory.
That critique continues to have legs in Spotsylvania. Today, right-leaning people still use public comments at Spotsylvania School Board meetings to pillory DEI and so-called indoctrination.
The new school superintendent, Clint Mitchell, has even been derisively labeled as a “DEI hire” — a not-so-subtle charge that his hiring was both procedurally flawed and racially motivated.
If you think it feels like we’re in the midst of a yet another pendulum swing in education, you would be correct. For the better part of the past 50 years, education has been on the front lines of the culture wars, where controlling the curriculum is the goal, and educating young people takes a back seat to whatever fear happens to be ginning the public debate.
There are many factors that go into explaining how we got here; I’ll point quickly to two.
First: Standards-based education. When well-executed, standards-based learning creates an intellectual and pacing framework for what students should learn. It does not, however, dictate how that material should be taught. Unfortunately, in the United States, standards-based education is grounded in the memorization of “facts” — always cherry-picked to satiate one political group or another — and who controls them. As such, standards-based education is not about teaching students to wrestle with increasingly complex ideas that empower them to become free-thinking, critical individuals.
Second: Loss of trust. Years of arguments suggesting that government — and anyone associated with it — is a failure has led to a level of mistrust of educators that has put them in an impossible situation. Especially in the liberal arts — which are the cornerstone of any responsible education — which necessarily confronts students with ideas that their parents don’t like. Because teachers and public education are no longer trusted, the reaction too often is to pummel the teacher and charge indoctrination.
How Far Will the White House Force the Issue?
As with so many of the changes we have written about in the Executive Order Project, the two actions described above are overly broad, ill-defined, and leave too much latitude for people to abuse them for their own ends.
This is especially troubling, because on issues of DEI and so-called indoctrination, we now face troubling questions about how deeply the federal government is proposing to reach into the classroom.
Trump has repeatedly said that he wants education to be in the hands of the states; but Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling makes clear that he intends to reach into the classroom to control what’s taught.
From the EO (bold text added for emphasis):
(b) The Ending Indoctrination Strategy submitted under subsection (a) of this section shall contain a summary and analysis of the following:
(i) All Federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology:
(A) in K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
(B) in K-12 teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, or training;
Curriculum, instruction, activities, teacher certification, licensing, employment, and training are now, and have always been, in the hands of the states. This action would appear to suggest that the White House intends to control at the federal level every aspect of what happens in a classroom. And who is in the classroom to teach.
The Advance reached out to Rick Hess at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute for his take on just how far the White House intends to push this agenda, and whether a book like The Souls of Black Folks could potentially become a target.
In an emailed response, Hess told the Advance: “It really depends on how the order is operationalized. My understanding is that they won’t tackle curricula but will, as [the Office of Civil Rights] did under Obama and Biden, address ‘hostile learning environments’— in which racial caricature or stereotypes are promoted in ways that disadvantage students. (So, privilege exercises, oppressor/victim dichotomies, etc.)”
I suspect that were the EO narrowly crafted to redress the particular issues Hess raised, there would still be pushback, but not the overarching fear that educators are now feeling about what will happen to them both in the classroom and their careers.
But even Hess, who holds degrees from Brandeis and Harvard, and previously taught at both the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University, isn’t fully confident that the White House won’t dip into the classroom.
“I wouldn’t expect history instruction [such as teaching The Souls of Black Folks] to be impacted. But we shall see.”
Testing Our Souls
Subtlety isn’t one of Trump’s strong suits. Nor is it for most of us.
Perhaps that’s because over the past quarter-century we’ve traded the hard work of education for test scores and highly scripted curricula that focus on factoids, but utterly fail at helping people understand how facts interact in the plasma that is the human condition.
Diane Sun, a young up-and-coming poet, recently wrote about what this obsession with easy answers is doing to our ability to truly think and wrestle with the complexity of ideas; indeed, the complexities of life in general.
Writing in the Washington Post, she said of AI-generated poetry that people prefer over accomplished poets like T.S. Eliot:
People prefer what they can comprehend, and collectively, we’ve lost our ability to comprehend poetry. The researchers behind the Nature study found that AI-generated poems used more obvious and direct language, making them more accessible to nonexperts. Participants didn’t have to struggle to analyze the nuanced shades of emotion and complex metaphors that adorn human poetry.
In the same way that ChatGPT allows us to avoid the struggles required to understand poetry, regulations aimed at silencing that with which we disagree prevents students from engaging in the struggles necessary to become adults who can create dynamic solutions to the problems we will face.
Education is only partially about facts. Done well, education is ultimately about challenging people to become better versions of themselves, and constantly challenging ourselves to make our society better.
In this quest for betterment, we will encounter ideas we do not like, that make us nervous, and, indeed, unsettle ideals we grew up with.
Stifling that discourse is no solution to our greater problem. Rather, we must face up to the realities of the challenges before us and wrestle with those unafraid to surface those problems, challenging us all to do better.
Gov. Youngkin’s and President Trump’s attacks on education are an attempt to deprive us of one of the two great traditions that have long served as one of the balancing forces in American life — liberalism, which is grounded in valuing individual freedom and recognizing that the march toward fulfilling the promises set out in the founding documents is an ideal that requires constant work.
But as Rick Hess has correctly pointed out, liberalism has also engaged in efforts to neutralize the other tradition that has balanced American life — conservatism, which is grounded in a respect of tradition.
Creating an environment where both can thrive is essential to our overall political and social health.
Our political debates that have made the national discussion impossible are now doing the same to the local discussion.
So how to decide whether something represents indoctrination or education? DuBois provides an answer.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
When we create an educational environment where individuals are free to be conservative or liberal “and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellow, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face,” we'll be talking about education rather than indoctrination.
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Great article.
Bravo, Mr. Davis, and thank you for your boldness in speaking the truth of "E pluribus unum" --the soul of this country--to all who have ears. Alas, that boldness is required. Chris Payton