Propaganda, indoctrination and education
When I was 4 I went to my kindergarten Halloween party in drag. My sister had a blond pageboy wig and a dress she'd outgrown, and as a boy so brown my eldest brother called me Pancho (as in Pancho Villa), I figured it would be fun to try to pass myself off as a fairhaired girl. Nobody in my family or at school seemed to think there was anything scandalous about it, and mostly what I remember is how strange it felt to feel the breeze blowing between my legs where my pants used to be.
In today's states waging war on “woke” and having panic attacks in the face of anything queer or nonconforming, I expect I would be shamed and sent home for trying to groom myself into transgenderhood. It turns out, except for the night of the 1969 Altamont dysfestival where I shared my sleeping bag with a guy named Norm whom I'd met that afternoon, that kindergarten costume was as close as I've ever come to being anything but a young male increasingly interested in females as the years rolled on. The role of girl for a day had no discernible impact on my development — though I take some pride in the fact that I've never, in many ways, been especially normal.
The furor over education in Florida, Texas, Tennessee and elsewhere — what books children may read, what kinds of entertainment they may watch, what history they can be taught — has got me thinking about the impression made on me of the patriotic propaganda I was subjected to through all the years of elementary school. From the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of “My Country
`Tis of Thee” every morning to the demonization of all things “communist,” my Cold War indoctrination was as complete as anyone's in those postwar times when the U.S. economy was booming and nobody my age (unless they were raised by Reds) knew any better than to accept at face value what we were told to believe.
It was later, during the civil rights and Black Power movements and the Vietnam War, that I and many of my contemporaries began to reevaluate the slogans and assumptions we had been raised on, and to question the authority of our indoctrinators. As we read more widely and deeply in history and looked at what was happening all around us, we shed the distortions and falsifications and oversimplifications of what we'd been taught as we processed the contradictions and began to draw our own conclusions.
So I doubt that today's kids will passively and permanently absorb whatever they're taught or exposed to in school, from kindergarten through college, of whatever ideological slant. My own experience suggests that even the most pervasive and persuasive arguments can, over time, completely collapse in the face of lived reality. The banned and censored authors of my youth — James Joyce, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and others deemed “obscene” by government authorities — have in many cases proved to be among the most important and influential literary figures of the last century.
The quality of their ongoing education, how well individuals learn to read and think critically and creatively, the courage of their curiosity, is likely to determine their success in forming their own values. For all the immediate damage the promotion of conformity may do, kids with enough resilience and skepticism and natural rebelliousness are likely to seek out what is forbidden if only to find out why.
The attempt to suppress information, to whitewash history, to groom obedient little automatons to vote for whatever demagogue attempts to strike fear and hatred in their hearts and minds, is doomed to fail in a land of ever-increasing cultural diversity where popular culture and the internet, for all their cacophony, inevitably expose young people to all kinds of things their parents or teachers or governors may disapprove of. Today's banned book may be tomorrow's classic, and yesterday's cross-dressing 4 year old may be today's independent thinker.