‘Indoctrination’? Depends who does it
John Brummett
In Sarah Sanders’ Arkansas, pub- lic schools may no longer share materials that impart the known fact that America has a racist history with scars evident still.
Those kinds of things violate the governor’s executive order against teacher indoctrination of our children.
Sanders’ Arkansas says our schoolchildren may be freely educated instead with materials from a conservative think tank’s “1776 Unites” project. That is an answer to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series called “The 1619 Project,” which holds that real American history begins with the arrival of Blacks as slaves to prop up the colonial economy and continues with the negative effects on Blacks to this day.
The “1776” project responds by propounding the opposite—that the Black experience in America has been, since our day of declared independence, a glorious and triumphant story about a country steadily making things better for the Black people living there.
That’s not indoctrination in the view of the Sanders-ites. It’s sweet, they think. It’s uplifting, they believe. It makes our children buoyant and gleeful about their country instead of thoughtful and introspective about their country, which presumably would be bad.
The first obvious conclusion from all that is that Sanders is not telling the truth, but being entirely hypocritical, when she crows that she opposes indoctrination. She endorses indoctrination—champions it—if she agrees with that which is being imparted for indoctrination.
Indoctrination, to her, means educating our children in theories and outright facts she doesn’t like.
By the dictionary, “indoctrination” means the “process of teaching a person or a group to accept only one set of beliefs and to do so uncritically.”
According to an article in this newspaper Monday based on Freedom of Information Act requests for communications among state Education Department staff on imposing Sanders’ executive order against indoctrination in the social studies field, officials purged materials celebrating great Black achievements through time in America. They did so because those celebrations are presented in the context of the suffering and challenges of those Black Americans making those achievements. We mustn’t have that.
Meantime, officials have newly added as permitted materials those of the “1776” initiative that emphasizes positive race gains all along America’s path—on that long arc of positivity through slavery to civil war to lynching to Jim Crow to unequal segregated schools to murders of Freedom Riders trying to register Blacks to vote, and to economically depressed, culturally disenfranchised and crime-ridden
Black neighborhoods.
Real indoctrination by the classic definition is telling schoolkids that there exists only one of those schools of thought. Real indoctrination is precisely what Sanders and her education minions are doing even as they allege it of others for the sins of disagreeing and educating objectively.
There are several dictionary definitions of “education,” but I choose this as my favorite: It is “the act of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself and others intellectually for mature life.”
Education would be having both sets of those materials available to teachers and students. The criticisms of our country on race should be available because they are sadly factual and relevant. The more positive, conservative-sanctioned message should be available because there indeed have been advances on race in America that the people forged through their government and on the bloody battlefield.
Education, if done well, encourages thinking rather than resenting. It instills the ability to see parts of two or more sides rather than one’s pre-set immovable and emotion-driven side.
America is a great country, but not always a good one. The American concept and aim are great; the American practice has been flawed in minor and major ways.
You can’t bring the American practice closer to the ideal—which ought to be what a great nation is all about—unless you’ve been educated on varied hard truths rather than indoctrinated only on sweet political spin.
It’s vital in that quest to assail indoctrination. It would help if those assailing it from the seats of state government would stop doing it.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.