Education Indoctrination

When and Why Did We Trade Education for Indoctrination?
I just lost some with that question and they are not curious to see what I say to back up this statement. Until earlier this year we were still teaching children in our school systems and universities. Homeschooling is still educating our children. My point is not to question the value of having great buildings and all of the benefits offered in our schools today or to diminish the level of training the teachers have today, even in the lower-performing schools. No doubt the college courses have focused on many areas that have benefited our children. Nothing I intend to say is to tarnish their abilities or their efforts to do the very best job to help every child get the best education possible. Now did I make that clear enough for everyone, including my family, friends, and “Facebook friends”? First, I will touch on the general definition is for “educate” and “indoctrinate” because I think I need to lay a foundation.

Educate: give intellectual, moral, and social instruction to (someone, especially a child), typically at a school or university.

Indoctrinate: to often repeat an idea or belief to someone until they accept it without criticism or question.

Every education process involves sharing key information about a subject; reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and many more courses. Another piece is the repetition of material to aid information retention. Then there is testing the retention of what has been learned. Review is another piece of the process so that “new” information does not overwrite or push out the previously learned information. Now that is from a person without a Teaching Certificate, but with 50 years of training, people to do many different jobs. Now that process is somewhat different when in practice in schools through high school and when used in universities. The teaching methods are the same, but at the universities – whether you pass or fail is solely your problem and not the professors. Another thing about lower education is that the “School District” and “State Education Board” set the goals/expectations for each school year. Teachers then TEACH to those goals/expectations. Universities provide classes on courses required for the various “Majors”, but I am focusing on Teaching only. Teaching materials at universities must meet some standards, but the authors of the textbooks may vary by different professors. Professors for courses in the “Teaching” part may be refined over years based on test cases in different school systems. I am going to “pause” this discussion at this point to move on.

Every Indoctrination process includes all of the methods of the education process, but with some key differences that everyone should be concerned about. Not because it is not effective, but because it has always been dangerous in every place it has ever been used throughout history. Most parents do not know the difference; however, I suspect that many have been concerned about the end result. So let me try to explain the indoctrination process differences without stating the general processes are the same as those identified above for “education”. If you look at the definition above for indoctrination, repetition becomes a major part of the entire process of teaching. It is very important to get the “learned result” to match the materials. This process has been used by world leaders and in education systems for many periods in history. Let me start with an example in grade school where it has been used as a teaching method – “Common Core Math”. The stated benefit was to teach students to think about math problems in a different way – actually totally different from what their parents were taught. I could write for days about the expected results and benefits, but not here. The bottom line, the teachers did not want the children to get help from their parents because the concept/method was totally different than what the parents would understand. The students did not want their parents to help because “they just did not understand”. The parents were frustrated, they tried for a while, then gave up and hoped for the best. The children’s math skills did not improve, but the children were taught they did not need to listen to their parents – ‘they were an unreliable source”. I could talk about “changes” in materials/methods in a number of core subjects, but they’re a couple of areas where those changes have been “sea change” with little notice. I could talk about the frog that stayed in the boiling water but understand that big change made in tiny changes over many years is hard to detect. Many parents cannot wait for their kids to graduate so they are done with homework and learn not to try to understand what their children are being taught.

Science and History have had major changes regarding what is being taught and the source of what is being taught. What was taught as theories in the 1950-60s have become “scientific facts” with no new evidence and with no other possible answers taught. Students are taught that their parents may not have had the benefit of having the new information available today so just use the information available in the class for assignments and tests. “History” has been rewritten with different views of the events, different reasons, different heroes, and different victims and much of our history is not even taught these days. The goal of teaching “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” has been replaced by a slanted version that focuses on a perceived un-justice that we can learn to “make right” with our actions. A view that almost all “leaders” of the past were more bad than good so the focus is not on the event as much as how that person(s) caused the problems that some people “face” today. This revision of history has been going on for so many years that many of the teachers teaching today were never taught the real history. The revision of history began in our universities by professors that were involved with terrorist activities in the 1960s and went on to become university professors. In those positions, they wrote books and published many articles, and made a lot of friends with liberals in the Democratic Party and in the media. A lot of people did not want to be drafted, or for their adult sons to be drafted, so they aligned themselves with ideas from these people and accepted that some different methods used were ok to get the result they wanted. This same group was into drug use (LSD, cocaine, heroin, Marijuana, and Barbiturates). No drug or substance was off-limits during the 60s. The 1960s were probably the decade where drug use changed the most and is probably one of the only decades exclusively defined by a counterculture movement full of protest, spiritual expansion, rebellion, art, and music. This quote probably says it better than anyone else could: “If you can remember the ’60s, then you weren’t there.”

To overcome the distractions that the students get with the information from their parents, repetition of the course materials and the idea of not using the information provided by parents becomes the part of the teaching method most productive. Some coursework may involve quizzes that ask questions about home or family members. Tests may be designed to get answers from the “new” concepts that may be different from the answers that a parent might give – a way of testing the “indoctrination” results. Let me say this loud and clear, the teachers were trained in a way that I doubt any of them even know how the process has shifted because that is all they have been taught. All teachers working today have been influenced by teaching methods touched by professors who lived in the 1960s or later. One last note on how quickly indoctrination can happen, just look at how quickly the majority have bought into their rights identified in the Constitution and are subject to be taken away and given back by so many people in offices that have no power to do so. How many people have turned in a business or group for violating orders given without legal powers? Hitler had most of the youth spying on and reporting their parents for actions and thoughts that did not support the “cause” – that took years but it worked. Here is an example of a professor that has had an impact on the education system and used indoctrination for all of his classes and teaching materials. He and others just like him began the rewriting of history through their slanted and vicious views. I could include another dozen examples, but this is a start.

William Charles Ayers: born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist. During the 1960s, Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground that opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his later work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction.

In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow imperialism. The Weather Underground conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings (including police stations, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon) during the 1960s and 1970s in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Ayers is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. He is married to lawyer and Clinical Law Professor Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather Underground.

Ayers became involved in the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He rose to national prominence as an SDS leader in 1968 and 1969 as head of an SDS regional group, the “Jesse James Gang“.

The group Ayers headed in Detroit, Michigan, became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weathermen. Before the June 1969 SDS convention, Ayers became a prominent leader of the group, which arose as a result of a schism in SDS.^[8] “During that time his infatuation with street fighting grew and he developed a language of confrontational militancy that became more and more pronounced over the year [1969]”, disaffected former Weathermen member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001. Ayers had previously been a roommate of Terry Robbins, a fellow militant who was killed in 1970 along with Ayers’ girlfriend Oughton and one other member in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, while constructing anti-personnel bombs (nail bombs) intended for a non-commissioned officer dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

In June 1969, the Weathermen took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected Education Secretary. Later in 1969, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket affair confrontation between labor supporters and the Chicago police. The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway.^[14] (The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, and blown up again by other Weathermen on October 6, 1970. Rebuilding it yet again, the city posted a 24-hour police guard to prevent another blast, and in January 1972 it was moved to Chicago police headquarters).^[16]

Ayers participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, and in December was at the “War Council” meeting in Flint, Michigan. Two major decisions came out of the “War Council”. The first was to immediately begin a violent, armed struggle (e.g., bombings and armed robberies) against the state without attempting to organize or mobilize a broad swath of the public. The second was to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country.^[17] Larry Grathwohl, a Federal Bureau of Investigation informant in the Weathermen group from the fall of 1969 to the spring of 1970, stated that “Ayers, along with Bernardine Dohrn, probably had the most authority within the Weathermen”.^[18]