We Educate: Don’t Accuse Us of Indoctrination
By Crystal Matey, PhD
On July 3, in front of Mount Rushmore, Trump claimed that “far-left fascism,” which “demands absolute allegiance,” is in being taught in our schools and that our children are taught “to hate their own country and to believe that men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains.”
A couple of weeks later, President Trump tweeted the following: “Too Many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!”
On September 17, standing in front of original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, he announced a national campaign to promote “patriotic education,” alleging that when we teach a more truthful version of our history that we are forwarding “hateful lies.” This “pro-American” curriculum has been named the “1776 Commission.” This 1776 Commission casts any criticism of the United States, even of slavery, as unpatriotic. Any education of the history of racism in this country, to Trump is “ideological poison” that threatens to erase the “miracle of American history.”
I should have known that this President would attack teachers and our educational system since he did it day one of his presidency; in his inaugural speech, he claimed that schools leave “students deprived of all knowledge.” And, of course, this is nothing new. The Right has been forwarding this kind of rhetoric since the 1970s. I’ve seen these sentiments for a while now, always from the Right and mostly from Evangelical Christians. I usually just brush it off and joke that I can barely get my students to bring their books to class or read the syllabus, so how exactly am I able to indoctrinate them with my “liberal agenda.”
But when the leader of this country continually attacks teachers, people who work way too hard for too little pay, I cannot remain silent any longer. It makes me sick to my stomach to hear our President direct those attacks in the midst of a pandemic, which has reclassified teachers as essential workers and put us on the front lines.
Teachers are literally dying so that students can receive a good education, and Trump wants to tear us down and insult the work we are doing. If this pandemic has revealed anything about America’s teachers, it is how crucial we are. Trump’s words are cowardly. They are disrespectful. They show a complete lack of empathy. And they disregard the many teachers who love your children and sacrifice time away from their family and money out of their wallet to ensure your children get the best education they deserve.
I am a product of a public-school education, and I hold four college degrees from public universities.
I’ve devoted my life to educating students. I taught English at public high schools in Florida for nine years.
I’ve been trained to teach English Language Learners, students with different abilities, and have had my syllabi rigorously vetted by the College Board. I’ve been observed by administrators and department heads every single year I’ve taught. For the past nine years, I’ve been teaching at the university level — first at a public university in North Carolina and currently at a public university in Georgia. And I’ve won multiple teaching awards for the work I do in the classroom.
Teaching has been my life’s work. It is my passion, my joy, my happy place. So, it’s difficult to see almost daily attacks on this nation’s educators. What do you think is happening in classrooms? Who do you really think your children’s teachers are? Do you think they are only left-leaning agnostics who meet in secret groups to devise plans on how to indoctrinate your children? I have many colleagues who are moderates or Republicans. I know many colleagues who are Christians (myself included) and people of other faiths. Teachers and professors, just like in the real world, are diverse and not a monolith. We come from all walks of life and from many different ideological viewpoints.
I can only speak for myself, but in my classroom, I teach students how to write clearly, how to develop strong arguments, and how to support their arguments. I teach them about Aristotle and his principles on rhetoric so that they can incorporate these ideas into their writing and remember that they are writing to an audience. I teach them how to review each other’s work and how to revise their own work. In my literature courses, we read texts ranging from over 400 years ago and to those that were recently published. I’ve taught classes focused on writing, world literature, literature and science, poetry, narrative, drama, Shakespeare, mad scientists, and gender in literature (the course catalog name, by the way). How is any of this rooted in indoctrination?
There’s actually quite a lot of research that shows that Trump’s way of thinking is far from true. Joshua M. Dunn Sr., an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, co-wrote Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, which concluded that “attempts at indoctrination don’t work.” Another study found that students who can sense a gap between their instructor’s political beliefs and their own were not likely to accept views that differed from their own and that, instead, students do push back against those views.
Attacks like Trump’s also disregard research that proves that one’s family has more impact on a young person’s political leanings than schools do. Some evidence shows that the most powerful effect on student thinking comes from their peers, so if their peer group supports a particular political candidate, that student is more likely to do so as well. Research also supports that schools are a place where students are taught to consider evidence before making decisions.
My classes are a place where students are taught to be independent thinkers. My classes, in fact, are often student-led. That means students develop class discussion topics, students share their viewpoints, and students teach the class. Students decide what they want to explore when it comes to writing assignments and creative projects. I facilitate, serve as a guide, and provide historical context and minimal direct instruction.
My classroom is a place where I want students to voice what they think, not parrot back what I think, which I typically don’t share with them in the first place. If a student sees a topic differently than I do, I don’t tell them that. I ask them what in the text supports their conclusions. Then, I ask the rest of the class if they read it the same way. If a student sees a topic in a similar way to me, I don’t let them know that either. In fact, I turn it around, often playing devil’s advocate, and ask, “But what about X? In this part of the text, this happens. Does that complicate your answer?” I do that because I want them to understand that meaning is complex, that truth is nuanced, and that there are often multiple “right” answers.
Because here’s the thing: my primary goal as your child’s instructor is for them to be creative and critical thinkers, for them to read and think about things from multiple perspectives and then decide how they feel, and for them to take charge of their own learning.
Now, I’ve had students say my class was too political when we read Oroonoko, a narrative written in 1688, so why is that?
The book is not about the United States. It’s not about Republicans and Democrats. The writer is British and lived in the 17th century.
Is it just that anything that presents something that differs from one’s opinion is automatically political?
Is it indoctrination to assign readings written from multiple perspectives, meaning women writers, Black writers, Muslim writers, Asian writers, and LGBTQ writers? Most teachers and professors want students to investigate, to read things that maybe conflict with their viewpoints, and to take what they have read and figure out what they think. It is not a place where professors stand at the front of the room pontificating on their political views.
But we are asking that students learn to think for themselves, and, sometimes, when students start doing that, while simultaneously being at a time in their development where they are figuring out their identity, their views may shift, but not because college professors have some liberal agenda. My classroom is a place where we embrace divergent viewpoints and where students are encouraged to disagree with one another because disagreement is healthy and valuable if handled in a respectful way.
In researching topics, I require that students also research positions that depart from their views because I want students to learn how to respectfully engage with and fairly handle those who disagree with them. Yet, it seems this kind of curriculum is seen as threatening to some. Don’t we want young people to be individuals, to develop their thinking, and be exposed to differing viewpoints?
I and the vast majority of my colleagues do not teach students to hate America, and we certainly do not tell them who to vote for or who we voted for. To teach students how rhetoric functions, I often rely on political art and recent political cartoons because it’s a topic that perfectly demonstrates how arguments are constructed. When I select those examples of strong rhetoric, they are selected for that reason alone. And I keep things balanced.
For example, if I use an example of false information in a meme spread by the Right, I also include one spread by the Left. If I include a satirical cartoon of a Republican politician, I pair it with one of a Democrat. Of course, there are some teachers who make their own political views known, but they are in the minority. The vast majority of us are trying to get students to read the syllabi, complete their assignments, and think for themselves.
Without multiple viewpoints in the classroom and without more honest representation of our country’s history, I’m afraid we could become like China, where the students from Kindergarten through university are forced to act out themes of patriotism and communist values. This program is part of a large effort to instill national dedication in China and grow a whole generation that will be loyal to Xi Jinping.
In other countries, such as Turkey, thousands of academics were removed from their teaching jobs at their president’s prompting. In India, the ruling nationalist party has attacked educators and created textbooks that promote the prime minister’s favorite policies. In Brazil, where their curriculum has undergone an overhaul, any mentions of feminism, violence against women, and homosexuality have been erased. Brazil’s president cut funding to the humanities and social sciences and announced his desire to have the military take over some public schools. In Hungary, the prime minister has imposed revisions to school curriculums so as to promote national and Christian identity.
These are the actions of authoritarians, autocrats, and demagogues. These are the kinds of actions that skew a child’s perceptions of their country and indoctrinate them to believe propaganda. These are the kinds of educational moves that result in indoctrination. The United States of America should have no place for such actions.
The changes Trump seeks to implement within our schools is the epitome of indoctrination — indoctrination that is a government approved, patriotic history. An indoctrination that eliminates the complexities and sometimes troubling aspects of our country’s founding. An indoctrination that ignores that our founders were human beings. An indoctrination that pretends this country has never engaged in problematic actions or passed unethical laws. An indoctrination that erases the lived histories of many of our country’s citizens. Trump’s proposed curriculum would teach our students nationalistic propaganda.
My fear is not an unfounded one, either. An organization that studies democracies around the globe — Varieties of Democracy — have come to some concerning conclusions. The United States is becoming more of an autocracy, meaning we are losing the traits that define a democratic country, and that loss has accelerated under Trump and his administration.
The kind of approach that Trump is championing when it comes to changing schools’ curriculums is one of the many democratic traits that are studied. And it’s even more troubling because only one in five democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy. These same kinds of patterns of decline were present in other countries such as Turkey and Hungary, which are no longer classified as democracies.
I’m fed up with politicians, political appointees, and American citizens, who have never once stepped foot into a classroom and seen what amazing jobs teachers are doing, continually attacking teachers and not looking to themselves to try to figure out why more young people are not embracing the Republican party. The younger generations are changing, not because of teacher indoctrination, but because they are witnessing changes in our country. Young people are more nervous about their futures. They see more levels of inequality.
Young people care about issues that the GOP doesn’t seem to focus on enough — issues such as the environment, expanding civil liberties, and the ever-widening wealth gap. Stop blaming teachers for problems that originate in the Republican party. Young people are calling out for what they believe in, but the Republican party would rather turn away from those voices and blame someone else for causing them, instead of looking to how they might attract more young voters.
In these turbulent and changing times, teachers are doing their best to meet their students’ needs. In a student body that is becoming more and more diverse as each school year passes by, teachers know that students want to learn from voices that represent them. Students are organizing and asking that schools embrace the changes they want, changes they feel will make them better citizens of this country.
High school students across the country are petitioning their school boards to make changes to curriculum, changes that include expanding the scope of history classes and making reading lists more inclusive. Trump does not have the authority or the power to change curriculum, but teachers can be part of the change that young people are looking for.
Unlike some in the Republican party, we are listening to the youth of America. Unfortunately, some will continue to demonize us for doing just that.
