Rachel Alexander Cambre
Are American schools overrun by indoctrination?
Many Americans think so. Parents today are rightly disturbed by upticks in racism, antisemitism, and gender confusion across K–12 campuses and blame ideological instruction for indoctrinating their children. From lesson plans forcing students to rank themselves according to their racial and gender “power and privilege” (and labeling Zionists “bullies”) to school policies encouraging students to socially transition behind their parents’ backs, the takeaway is the same: Individuals are defined by immutable “identities” that consign them to categories of “oppressor” or “oppressed.”REF Rather than liberating students to think for themselves as education should, parents argue, these lessons indoctrinate them in a particular ideology.
At the same time, defenders of public school curriculum materials and policies contend that the alternatives championed by dissatisfied parents propagate the very “indoctrination” they claim to condemn. When classical charter schools emphasize virtues and the Western canon, for example, critics at the Network for Public Education accuse them of indoctrinating students with “Christian nationalism,” while those at Americans United for Separation of Church and State deem the inclusion of biblical literacy as an academic subject to be evidence of indoctrination and “religious coercion.”REF And, in an inversion of the argument against school policies that alienate children from their parents, opponents of homeschooling charge families with indoctrinating their children by alienating them from the public school system’s secular “solidarity.”REF
Curriculum disputes such as these raise questions about what it actually means to indoctrinate. Is the term simply a pejorative opponents use when they disagree over classroom content? That is, does all education necessarily “indoctrinate” pupils, with disagreements over the proper means and ends of education inevitably devolving into “a war between differing forms of indoctrination,” as an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently put it?REF Or does indoctrination denote a practice meaningfully distinct from the art of educating? » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/liberal-educations-antidote-indoctrination
