Indoctrination

While back on the newsfroup in which I participate, we all had one of our bazillions of fistfights over "indoctrinating" young people. The conservatives are all against the indoctrination of children in the "liberal" manifesto that they see going on in public skools. The libs are all unhappy about the "indoctrination" of youth in horrible religion stuff, when they get to see little Johnny pray before a test or have the teach say "Under God" or something.

It made me think about indoctrination, though. We do. Indoctrinate our young. In our ideals. How can we not?

My buddy PJ had a comment in her insightful and wonderful poast about Freedom on her blog (link below):

But still, even reciting the Pledge day after day after day didn't really make me think about what I was saying, or what it actually meant. I didn't feel patriotic reciting it, and it didn't prompt me to think about freedom. It prompted me to think about how I wished we could get it over with because I was bored. -- pj's place

The idea that repetition will indoctrinate one in an ideal is common, but PJ's right. That alone won't do much for you. Same with repeating the Lord's Prayer, something that goes on in mainstream Christian churches without thought. And the Apostle's Creed (or variations of same). We don't even stop to think about the words.

That was brought home one day when one of the pastors read an insightful commentary where the writer walked, line by line, through the Prayer, as though God had been sitting at a table across from him and helping him think about it.

We'll mouth anything we're fed, and give it no thought, and that kind of thing does nothing to indoctrinate us into whatever it is supposed to promote. We just say it and move on.

It isn't until something significant happens that those words might then hit home.

It's just prep work.

Letting Johnny pray in class isn't going to turn Hamad into a Christian. It isn't going to poison Libby Rawls away from her daddy's atheism. Reciting the Pledge isn't going to make Dick, Jane, or Spot believe any more firmly in what their country stands for and Jane just might grow up to want to bomb some building in East Bumfuck, USA.

So what are these recitative icons good for?

I happen to like both the Prayer and the Pledge when I stop to ponder them, because I have taken some time to know their histories, their stories, and what the lines mean when taken individually and then pasted back together into their context. That's the only way this kind of "indoctrination" will work -- if you also educate and have your students (young and old) stop and think.

To do that, they also have to know about the alternatives. They have to know what it means to be a student in a despotic nation (as PJ's wonderful post described) and they have to know what other people believe, and why this belief is what's being promoted as the "correct" belief.

Indoctrination is pfui. It's what the Nazis did. It's what those who fear do.

Education is what we, as Americans, should be all about.