The Teaching-Indoctrination Confusion

So already, when did teaching become synonymous with indoctrinating? And when did teaching history to students become synonymous with indoctrinating them with "the lesson to be learned" from it? Finally, when did withholding historical facts and artifacts from students become the antidote to indoctrination?

These questions all re-entered my mind this morning when I saw the headline of the "Political Notebook" feature in today's Boston Globe: "Education issues top GOP's presidential race." According to this feature, Republicans are especially targeting race- and gender-related curriculum and instruction.

Oh, how we fear facts because of the conclusions students might draw from them!

I have a theory about why the "teaching=indoctrinating" belief is so robust among many Americans whose goals are not obfuscation and political power. It's less about their psychologies and sociological needs than "the articles" say. 

My non-research-based belief is that their own educations were more indoctrination-centered--or at least, interpretation-centered--than inquiry-centered. In other words, as students, more often than not, they were handed conclusions rather than asked to draw them. So they fear that students today are being similarly told what to think, and even what to believe.

Certainly my own my eighth-grade US history class was centered on the interpretations drawn by my teacher. She taught that the Civil War was fought about states rights, not slavery; we, her students, weren't asked, based on our considerations of various speeches and events, what we thought the Civil War was fought about.

Interestingly, that I had been taught an interpretation of American history was not something I understood until well into my teaching career, which emphasized inquiry and critical thinking with awareness of perspectives. But my teacher wore a Confederate uniform to teach the Civil War and wrote "Save your Confederate money, boys--the South will rise again" at the bottom of our tests and quizzes--and this was in late 1968, just months after Martin Luther King, Jr.s assassination. I can't say she didn't have an agenda in sharing her interpretation.

I know: you may be thinking that I'm confusing indoctrinating with interpreting. And I do understand there's a difference. Indoctrination is a deliberate practice aimed at shaping beliefs about--as opposed to understandings of--how the world works, has worked, and should work, often for the purpose of keeping people in the fold or winning them over to a side or a cause. In contrast, interpretation, even when it's too passionately communicated or unsuccessfully hidden, doesn't have that aim. What alarms me is when students aren't given the chance to draw and honor their own conclusions, even if those conclusions are tentative works-in-progress. And especially if those conclusions might rock the boat.

In addition, I get disturbed when opinions are presented as indisputable truths. I feel pretty confident that students in inquiry-centered classrooms, on encountering Nikki Haley's recent pronouncement on Twitter that "CRT [Critical Race Theory] is un-American," would immediately ask, "From whose perspective? According to what criteria?"

I do appreciate that teachers have always wielded a lot of power and still wield a lot of it today. After all, they grade kids. And I also know that many teachers are themselves products of educational systems in which the teacher's interpretation was gospel and had to be learned--essentially memorized and parroted back. Furthermore, I believe some teachers may not realize the degree to which they are communicating if not necessarily imposing their interpretations and beliefs.

I remember thinking this some years ago when I was a teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. When several students arrived late to study hall one day and I asked why they were late, they explained that they'd been studying with other students for their test in the Advanced Placement English class the next day. "We were agreeing on what Mrs. ______ (name withheld) thinks about ____________ (title of book withheld) so we could give it back to her on tomorrow's test," said one boy.

Their teacher, my colleague, loved literature and loved students. Thanks to her focus and dedication, her students could skillfully detect evolving literary motifs, identify significant narrative structures, and perceive subtle variations in tone. But despite their having gained great meaning-making tools from her, they still believed that she expected them to interpret literature as she did--and would grade them in accordance with her expectation.

Frankly,  I don't believe any of them would have accused her of indoctrination. But I do wonder if expressed zealous interpretation can be a precursor to indoctrination in some instances. 

That's all the more reason inquiry-centered teaching is essential. The solution to the education-as-indoctrination slippery slope is always to make central students and the facts, information, artifacts, and arguments that, ideally, compel them to apply their developing critical thinking abilities. Students can be taught and trusted to draw their own conclusions about "what happened and why," the way the world works, and causes and effects, even those that cross borders and decades.

If the solution to the teaching and learning problems that Republicans identify is to hide historical reports, events, and artifacts, then they must be very afraid of what students might conclude on the basis of them. In the best cases, teaching leads to learning, whether or not we like what students learn.