Continually telling a toddler to not go onto the road is important. As the child may not yet have the language skills to understand an explanation, a parent will resort to whatever they can to ensure their child will not stray on the road. They instill in the child a belief that they should not go onto the road because it is dangerous.
But not too long after that, children develop language and with patience, a parent can teach the child more about their environment so that the child can recognise and understand risk. One of the parent’s most crucial roles in those first few years is to keep the child safe.
And eventually, the child goes to school
.
So perhaps I can start this essay with some definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary.
Education: a process of teaching, training, and learning, especially in schools, colleges, or universities, to improve knowledge and develop skills
Indoctrination: the act or process of forcing somebody to accept a particular belief or set of beliefs and not allowing them to consider any others
Propaganda: ideas or statements that may be false or present only one side of an argument that are used in order to gain support for a political leader, party, etc.
Belief: a strong feeling that something/somebody exists or is true; confidence that something/somebody is good or right
I guess everything is a belief. At some point in time, human beings made collective agreements on certain things to help us to navigate the world and communicate with each other. We have all agreed that water is water, that a tree is a tree, and a star is a star.
It would be very difficult if I was to tell you to walk down the road till you get to the big woody thing with the green things all over it. Oh, how did I know to call it woody, or green, or where did the word road come from? Get my drift?
Perhaps in simpler times, there was less for people to need to know. Certainly, language was needed. Finding, growing, or catching food were needed skills. And creating clothing and shelter were also important. Then some general knowledge about weather, environmental dangers and poisonous plants would have been needed.
But humanity has evolved from those times and the world we live in is so much more complex, convoluted, and unpredictable. Finding a way to create a fulfilling and enjoyable life is a journey itself. Life doesn’t appear to be just a survival game.
So, at the age of five or six, we send our children off to school. Our education system helps children to grow and expand. Participation in sport helps their bodies to grow and function in a physiologically optimal manner. Academic learning expands the capacity of the mind. As language skills learn, a child gains the skills necessary to pursue more expanded learning opportunities in books, journals and online.
Along the way, the child gains a deeper understanding of the world. Basic sciences teach the child about the basic chemical structure of things, the physics behind motion, force, gravity and inertia, the biology of life and the fundamental tenants of behavior.
As the child’s knowledge expands, they discover areas that seem to pique their curiosity and tend to draw their interest. It may be one of the sciences, literature, music, art, law, economics, engineering, or a plethora of other fields of study.
Great educators never give answers. They support the student to explore. They ask great questions and present problems to be solved. They put forth the ideas of others for exploration, all the while, allowing the student to discover their own thoughts and ideas.
Almost universally, those who have made great discoveries have attributed part of their success to great teachers who challenged them to expand their thinking and open their minds to possibility.
Teachers have power. They stand before children as someone who knows. There is extraordinary responsibility in this profession for a teach to remain neutral and keep the space open for the child to learn, to support them when they are struggling and to maintain safety so that the child can make mistakes without fear of humiliation and continue to learn.
A Teacher’s role is never to stand before a class and deliver their point of view on a topic as if it is correct, true and beyond question. In such a moment, the teacher ceases to educate and begins to indoctrinate.
For example, a teacher might say, “Dostoevsky is the finest author who ever lived and even the greatest literary critics of our time agree. There is no question.” That is indoctrination.
Or a teacher might say, “Dostoevsky is a brilliant writer who has a profound command over the English language and a rare understanding of human behavior, and he writes with an extraordinary ability that seems to give the reader ability to almost feel the characters in his books.” That is an opinion that may draw curiosity and interest. It is where a teacher invites a student to explore the work of a great author.
Teachers have enormous power and a binding responsibility to use that power wisely. It is not an easy task. Sometimes a teacher can be passionate about a cause which is ok. And the teacher may share with students that they have a passion, and about it. But the challenge for the teacher is to share access to opposing views so that they student may learn and develop their own ideas.
For example, the teacher may have strong views about the environment and may follow the work of a particular scientist or group of scientists. They are free to share those views with their students. But from there, to remain an educator, they must then direct the students to the opposing viewpoints and allow freedom for discussion, disagreement, and debate.
When a teacher seeks to indoctrinate, they are attempting to instill a belief in their students. This is almost impossible to do when the student is strong-willed and confident. However, not every student has a strong will or is confident.
Just as an aside, imagine for a moment if we all-of-a-sudden decided that commas could be placed anywhere in text, or left out completely. Imagine if we decided, “You can put the comma wherever you believe it looks best. Sentence structure is just a belief and may not serve who you are, and you may not identify with it. So go ahead, feel free to either leave commas out, or put them wherever you want.” Could, or would, you ever be able to read anything again. Some beliefs are helpful.
Often, a belief can be destructive, especially when adopted out of fear. A simple example. Let’s say that when you were four, your dad was reading you a story. In the story there is a tiger and your day, being playful, raises his hands to look like claws and says, “Ooh, Tigers! They eat people!” And you quickly decide that you will have to avoid tigers in future. Then a little while later in the story, you learn that the tiger lives in the jungle. You also decide, out of fear, that jungles are dangerous. Twenty years later, on a holiday in Thailand, a friend tells you that the resort recreation leaders are taking a group to the top of a nearby mountain to view the sunrise. It is just a 30-minute walk through the jungle and a short climb. But for you, there is no enthusiasm for that. You do not realise that the word “jungle” sucked all the excitement out of the event. You have lost all awareness that you have a belief that the jungle is a dangerous place, somewhere you could be killed.
When fear is used to instill a belief, we lose our ability to maintain a broad perspective and we see the world through a narrow and rigid truth. Anything that opposes that belief becomes a threat.
When someone is seeking to indoctrinate another, they will use persuasion and the easiest of all is fear.
This should not even be a consideration in a classroom. Children go to school to learn, not to be indoctrinated. Some schools are religious and parents may choose to send their children there. Part of their education will have a level of indoctrination involved as much of what they teach in the religious sphere is not provable. Parents agree to this. One could still argue that it is not right, but at least it is stated up-front.
The challenge we have now though is that indoctrination has become common place in school classrooms. For example, climate change.
Children are being indoctrinated into the thinking that carbon emissions are destroying the environment and that global warming may well destroy their future. Of course, there are thousands of rational scientists across the globe who believe that there is no valid data to support this theory. I have spent hours reading and listening and have also come to believe that we have nothing to fear and that our obligation is to care for our environment, which includes not polluting it.
But we now have a couple of generations of young people who have bound their very existence to the belief that there is an impending “Environmental Armageddon” and that they have reason to fear their future. Further, they believe that there are too many humans on the planet as overpopulation has caused this environmental destruction. As a result, young girls and young women are driven to a state of anxiety at the thought of producing a child.
When you indoctrinate, you are setting a ship on a fixed course with no clue as to what reefs might be in its path. Your self-serving recklessness may be the start-point of a catastrophic destruction of a life.
Who gives a teacher the right to decide that what they believe is truth, and then to decide that it is ok to force that truth on someone else’s child? Such behavior is beyond outrageous. It is a form of egotistical mayhem of the kind that leads to delusion, domination and even violence and brutality.
Right now, in Western Schools, teachers are stepping out of the sacred sanctuary of education and into the viper pit of indoctrination. Their self-serving and virtue signaling righteousness is leading children down a dark path to fear driven obedience and subservience. Climate Change, Trans Activism. DEI, ESG and Marxism are the flavors of the day.
Children are having their creative potential crushed as they are being dominated into thinking along restricted lines, bringing them into conflict with their parents, drowning their minds in anxiety and leaving them feeling vulnerable and at risk in a modern world where there are few actual dangers.
I ask you. What will happen to the world when it is these generations turn to lead society.
We have little time left to act. Parents across the globe must demand more from schools, must fight to ensure their children are educated and that all indoctrination is banned from the classroom. Our future may well depend on it.
Of course, that may well mean a reform to teacher education as well, which may require a change of government. What do you think?
Finally, perhaps the greatest fear for many is cancellation and exclusion. The odd thing is that such a terrible experience may well be the thing that leads to the restoration of true self, as the cancelled person, instead of being defeated and decaying, experiences a reawakening of their will, driven by survival instincts, that can lead them back onto a path of self-growth, discovery and eventually, self-realization.
If you would like to explore more about belief and indoctrination, you can explore some of Harry Palmer’s writings
.
Thanks for writing on this important issue John. I have kids approaching school age so are looking at schools in Sydney and it’s scary how far many of them have strayed into this kind of indoctrination.
On a more positive note, when I was in Japan recently I had the good fortune of checking out a school there. They don’t have cleaners and instead it is the students’ responsibility to keep their environment clean. For half an hour each day they divide into teams and clean the school. (Helps explain why public places in Japan are always so clean and tidy.) Not only that, but they have also been taught meditation and self-reflection and use that time to reflect on themselves - their thoughts and actions - and self-correct where needed. Then they go back to class and carry on with their day.
I was at the school while the kids were doing one of these sessions. It was such a great thing to see. Imagine going through all the rigamarole of being a teenager and taking time each day to reflect on yourself and self-correct.