The Content of My So-Called Indoctrination

Challenging The Claim of Radical Indoctrination in Public Schools Through Recollection of My K-12 Education

A slightly edited version of Big Brother’s eye from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s edition of 1984

In the same week that my five-year-old stepped out of my car for the first day of kindergarten and that my dad told me over breakfast that I was indoctrinated in public schools (certainly not for the first time), I saw this note:

You’ve heard this before. Public schools are the instrument of an increasingly totalitarian state that is concertedly indoctrinating kids into the radical socialist ideologies of CRT and LGBTQ+ propaganda. Every time I hear these claims, I dismiss them as baseless because I don’t remember anything like that (I graduated in 2016), but after reading this note, I thought, “Well, let’s test the assumption and purposely recall as much as of the material I learned as possible.” So I made a list. Here is a non-exhaustive version of that list (because who wants to hear about math classes?) featuring the recollections that rose to the top:

• “Character Counts.” Its a phrase the grownups at my elementary school threw around a lot. There were big banners in the gym and posters in the classrooms with virtues like Kindness, Patience, and Perseverance. When we exhibited any of these virtues, teachers would reward us students with “Character Bucks.” I don’t remember what we spent those on. Probably copies of the Communist Manifesto and pornography.

• From early grades to later ones, I learned American history and read its pivotal documents. I read the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. We didn’t have Hamilton back then, so I just had to learn about him from the textbooks. Though they threw away that shot, my point is I learned about this part of my so-called heritage, complete with pledges of allegiance and the belting of anthems.

  • Yes, I learned about the forced removal, murder, and genocide of Native Americans. Did that teach me to hate America? I suppose I could’ve arrived at that sentiment, but I didn’t. Yes, I learned about slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement (even if somewhat sanitized versions). Does the fact that I learned about race or racist laws mean I was taught CRT? Of course not. I don’t remember any teacher explicitly proposing the theory that America is systematically racist or that race is an invented social construct created by oppressors to subjugate others. Personally, I think there is a lot of truth to both of those propositions, but regardless, they never came up in my classrooms.

• On the note of race, I learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in 8th grade. Thankfully, my youth pastor had sensitively introduced me to that in the heart of Greenwood a year or two earlier and forever changed the way I understood my city. In class we learned the history and read If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa’s 1921 Greenwood Riot.¹ I’m grateful to have learned about this in school unlike thousands of children before me — likely even my oldest brother — for whom it was omitted by design.

• I can’t remember the praises of diversity ever being sung explicitly, however it continues to be one of the most cherished features of my experience in public school (as opposed to private &/or home school). I went to a high school with some 3,000 students. That’s five times larger than my mom’s home town! Unlike that Ohio town (okay, it’s been downgraded to village status), my high school had people from all races, religions, heritages, and classes sorted into the array of usual high school clubs and cliques.

• Yes, I was taught about evolution (as a theory, I believe), but mostly about natural selection. Even most creationists can get onboard with the latter, so nothing too controversial there.

• Yes, I was taught extensively about climate change in AP Environmental Science. My teacher, a geologist and known atheist, taught it as fact (as frankly, he should have). No, I don’t believe my teacher was a radical socialist plant by the government to warp my mind. In fact, he was one of my favorite teachers. He was genuinely hilarious and introduced me to some of the best bad movies ever (Cane Toads, Soylent Green, etc). I’m grateful for the science I learned about our world’s changing climate in his class and I appreciated his presence as a kind atheist in my Christian bubble of an upbringing.²

You can tell this guy was well-loved. And yes, we were a purposely awkward bunch.

• I had an incredibly memorable experience in my creative writing class once. We were all assigned to give a presentation about our lives and one girl ended up sharing about the abortion she had received and how deeply she regretted it. It personalized what may have been a theoretical and political issue to us young students and introduced its many complexities. It was a fiercely brave thing to share and she deserves that credit, but its likely not something she would have felt safe sharing were it not for our open-hearted teacher.

  • In that same class, the teacher once showed us Rent, the film adaptation of a broadway musical about the aids epidemic in 1980s New York. Fittingly, there were several queer characters and a moment where some of them kissed. I mention this instance because it’s the only instance in my entire K-12 education that I recall featured something LGBTQ+ themed and it was obviously the choice of my teacher and not prescribed by a curriculum. She certainly didn’t turn off the movie and tell us that gender is a social construct, that our sexuality exists on a spectrum, and that we should explore gender identities beyond the horizon of our assigned sex. Again, my personal beliefs on those ideas aside, these things simply were not taught in my very typical high school and I strongly suspect they aren’t being taught at the high school in your neck of the woods either.

• Finally, the most important part of my education was the books I was introduced to. My 6th-grade teacher read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief aloud to my class and converted me from a self-proclaimed book hater to book lover. I picked up the rest of that series, then similar books, then theological and spiritual books, and eventually books of all types. I likely would’ve been converted at some point, but I owe that life-changing shift to her (and Rick Riordan, I suppose). In English classes across the years, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn (the greatest American novel in some people’s opinion), Great Gastby, The Heart of Darkness, and even Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (I’ll grant my critics that was an odd choice). In government or history classes, I was introduced to The Crucible, Atlas Shrugged, Animal Farm, and 1984.³ Now, do we really think a totalitarian system would assign its students to read those last ones? A totalitarian system necessitates that its subjects are blind to its manipulative tactics and those books shine an indisputably powerful light on such tactics.

With my admittedly cherry-picked list stated, I want to emphasize that my teachers never told me what to believe or said I was supposed to think a certain way. I was presented with neutral material and allowed my own freethinking regarding it. Also, I’m getting a little lofty here as I speak about an education that almost exclusively centered on testing. The state and district didn’t care about what I thought, only that I was able to regurgitate information. There’s a real issue worth talking about. Maybe I was indoctrinated that God is dead and that I should worship the state, but I just forgot it because I passed the test and deleted the information to make room for more useless test score fodder.

But I digress because the concern of this post is being hotly debated right now in my state where education superintendent, Ryan Walters announced “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.” He argued that the Bible is an important historical document that has had a large influence on America. Without a doubt, he is right about that and for that reason, I have no problem with the Bible being an educational subject in K-12 public schools. The important question is, how will it be taught? Will it be taught at a slant, heavily implying that it is the truth? Or will it be taught like other literature in a neutral fashion? Though Walters conveniently didn’t clarify, I think it’s clear that the former is what he envisions. It’s ironic that the people who want the Bible taught authoritatively in public schools are often the same ones complaining incessantly that public schools are brainwashing children in Marxism.

As evidenced by my complaints about over-testing, you can tell I’m not entirely rosy-eyed and uncritical about my public school education. I’m an education nut, so sure, I would’ve preferred a more liberal arts, classical-type education, but while we didn’t read all the Great Books, we read some as I’ve mentioned, and those count. Books can live on with us where teachers and curriculums can’t. So while my education wasn’t perfect (few have such a privilege), compiling this list made me feel grateful for that education. I am not writing this post because my education was exceptional. On the contrary, it was entirely unexceptional. Without doing intensive research into each state’s curriculums, I am fairly confident that my education was decently representative of the average public schooler’s. I’ve been a little sassy in this post, but let me be clear: I was not indoctrinated and frankly, the claim is presumptuous and condescending for anyone who didn’t graduate in the last decade to make. Even if I was 10% indoctrinated, the claim implies that the content of my so-called indoctrination is a glass ceiling that I am not capable of breaking to think critically for myself. If you assert that public school graduates were brainwashed, then you can effectively discount them altogether because the poor plebeians are unable to transcend their programming.

The claims about CRT being taught are mischaracterizations. The idea that CRT teaches certain races are good and others bad is 1). not true⁴, and 2). not what I or my peers were taught. As I’ve mentioned, I was taught about the forced removal of Natives, Jim Crow, and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and in exactly zero of those lessons did a teacher say or even imply that white people are essentially evil. For the people complaining we are raising a coddled and fragile generation, they sure are scared of their kids maybe, possibly, potentially getting the wrong idea in a history lesson and getting offended. Instead, they’d prefer our public schools take the “Don’t Say Gay” bill approach and just pretend things they don’t like don’t exist if you don’t talk about them. I won’t pretend content doesn’t matter, but as with the Bible or American history, it’s less about what you cover (let’s strive to be as complete as possible) and more about how you cover it that determines whether indoctrination is happening.

I’m a proud public school graduate and I’m tired of hearing the many wonderful teachers I had get dunked on and have their noble work demeaned by conjecture that they are mere puppets doing Big Brother’s bidding. I’m tired of the inference that my peers were infected with a mind virus that forever debilities their ability for critical thinking. Most of all, I’m tired of having my educational experience which benefited me in countless ways mischaracterized as something I know it wasn’t.

A proud little pawn celebrating his brainwashing

A People Pleaser’s Addendum:

• I don’t know much about the person who shared the Note at the beginning of the post and I don’t intend to present him personally as a representative for all the views I’ve criticized. I’ve seen a decent amount of Notes from him that I’ve hit the like button on, so we probably align on more than we differ. That said,

  Jacob Allee
  I welcome your input &/or response.

• I also mentioned my dad right up front. I didn’t share his comment as a condemnation. I am very grateful for my dad and I’s ability to discuss our political &/or theological disagreements while sustaining a great relationship. He’s also like my biggest supporter on here, so hi Dad! Thanks for reading! 😉

  ---

  This was a bit of a detour from my usual writing here, which is less political and more spiritual. I’m working on Chapter 3.2 of the Reasons to Leave series and I look forward to sharing it.

1. This book was published in 2002 before the Oklahoma state legislature passed a resolution to officially refer to the event as the Tulsa Race Massacre rather than the Tulsa Race Riot (which implied blame on the part of Black Tulsans and was part of the long cover-up and sanitation of the event).

2. I realize I’ve armed my potential critics with plenty of ammo in that bullet point, so I should clarify that my teacher never taught his atheism to us. It was just known he was an atheist and he’d talk about it if you were interested.

3. Also, while I was never assigned to read Fahrenheit 451, I was taught about Ray Bradbury and the ominous warning that “Where they burn books, they’ll burn people too.”

4. There are plenty of sources to learn about CRT from, but I’d point you toward this episode interviewing lawyer and historian, Dr. Robert Chao Romero entitled “What is Critical Race Theory?”