Education or Indoctrination?

By Teresa Ambord

Our schools are filled with many fine teachers, most of whom are probably underpaid for all they do for our kids. Like us, teachers have strong opinions and values and wish to teach those things to their own children. That's the way it should be. Parents have the right and the obligation to teach their children their values.

Of course, as teenagers become young adults, they will ultimately determine what views to adopt and what to reject. But some teachers and even school districts have usurped the rights of parents and, rather than teaching history and math, and other traditional subjects, have begun to teach their own values in the classroom.

Don't Give Up Your Parental Rights!

In a country at war such as America, even people who have never considered themselves political are becoming so, especially in an election year. For many people their values and politics are inseparable. To some degree it's hard to fault a teacher for sharing their political biases because our beliefs are fundamental to who we are. But regardless of which party you belong to, schools full of captive audiences are not the place for political preaching. Parents need to be heads-up when teachers and school districts impose their political doctrines on their children.

When war in Iraq became inevitable, some California Bay Area schools adopted an antiwar stance into the curriculum. They teach students that the war is immoral, in spite of the fact that many students have parents and siblings in the military, deployed to fight the war.

Find Out What Your Kids Are Being Taught

History is history and it cannot be changed, right? Yet some history teachers have decided to alter the facts according to their views. Steve Miller, a student at a southern California high school tells how he thought his teacher had decided to skip the Mexican-American War altogether. Then he realized that the teacher had merely renamed the war the "The North American Invasion," attempting to change history. In a school that was already troubled by racial and ethnic tension, this teacher threw fuel on the fire to promote his own politics.

Repetition is Key

Teachers will tell you, repetition is a key to learning. They use it all the time. Steve Miller's school invited a series of speakers to address the students on various issues. When Steve and others noticed that all the speakers shared the same political view (which coincided with the views that most of the teachers and administrators espoused) the students asked to hear speakers with alternate views. But the administration fought for nine-months to keep them out. The message was clear... no opposing views were welcome.

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Biases Taught as Facts

We send our children to school to learn to read and write and calculate. We expect that through the educational process they will learn to think critically. But when the biases of the educators are superimposed on impressionable captive audiences no individual thought is possible. In Steve Miller's school, students who thought critically and came up with opinions different from the school were given low grades. Though they claimed to teach critical thinking, the result many schools and/or teachers seek is uniformity.

Often the effort to indoctrinate is subtle. One election year a student assured his mother that his teachers never talked about politics. She was glad to hear that, but was surprised when she visited one of the classes and saw that the bulletin board was decorated with one candidate's campaign stickers. Again, the message was subtle but clear. While a teacher may not be able to completely separate her politics from her classroom persona, campaigning in front of a captive, impressionable audience of our children is indoctrination, not education.