When education becomes indoctrination

Once upon a time the prime objective of education was to teach individuals to be self-thinking adults.  This was achieved by focusing on what were commonly referred to as the 3 Rs; reading, writing, and arithmetic.  These three subjects were regarded as crucial to one’s development since the goal of educators of the time was much nobler then preparing the student for a job.  They recognized that democracy could not exist without a solid citizenry made up of independent thinking individuals.  It was their goal to create such a citizenry by teaching:  

• Reading: If a person can read he can independently learn without being told what to learn.  He can develop his own way of thinking without being told what to think.  In other words, it leads to education while avoiding indoctrination.
•  Writing: By developing the ability to communicate in verbal and written language the individual can effectively communicate his ideas, thoughts, and opinions with others.
• Arithmetic: It has long been accepted that math develops analytical skills.  Increasing math ability also increases a person’s ability to think analytically.  

Once mastered and applied, these three skills gave the individual the foundation to learn any subject he wanted, communicate what he has learned, and, most importantly, to think critically for himself.  This resulted in unleashing the creativity, originality, vision, and ingenuity of the individual person, which benefited not only the individual but also the society as a whole.

Unfortunately, over the last several decades the 3 Rs have lost favor with the elites that direct what our schools are teaching our children.  

In his book the Lonely Crowd, David Riesman (considered the father of American sociology) points out that the education system has consistently moved away from developing educated self-thinking individuals to creating citizens who can relate to others.  As a result the 3 Rs have been replaced by 

• Conformity
• Sensitivity
• Thinking “correctly” 

Although his book was written in the 1950s, the process of getting students to think “correctly” started nearly a half a century before.  As the Commissioner of Education under President Taft, William Harris, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. - The Philosophy of Education (1906)

Four generations later, John Gatto, the recipient of New York City’s 1990 Teacher of the Year award, would remark on how thorough the collectivist transformation of the education system has been.  In a speech, he observed that “schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”

As recently as 2008, a California appellate court re-affirmed this collectivist approach to education when it ruled that the “primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism, and loyalty to the state and nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”  [If this does not scare you, nothing will!]

Note that in each of these examples, there is no mention of creating self-thinking individuals.  In fact, the quotes seem to imply that the modern method of education sees individualism as something that needs to be discouraged or even eliminated.  Neither is the revered Gifted (or Gate) program a safe haven for the individualistic and self-thinking youngster.  In his biography of Winston Churchill, renowned historian William Manchester notes that the standards teachers use to select bright students “would have excluded Churchill, Edison, Picasso, and Mark Twain.”  

When does education become indoctrination? 

I believe that the line between the two is crossed when we start teaching what to think instead of how to think. The sad truth is that we are no longer teaching our children how to think.  Instead, we are telling them what to think.  Our schools have passed through education and onto indoctrination.  Until that is changed, our education system can never be fixed; regardless of how much money we throw at it.