The Content of Students' So-Called Indoctrination

Moving Beyond the Personal and Into the Universal

An inverted and altered version of Big Brother’s Eye from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s edition of 1984

Last month I wrote a post about my experience in public schools to demonstrate I was not indoctrinated. My post, which was partly a response to a Note by

Jacob Allee

, was met with a comment from him, validly stating:

Public education is not monolithic, and some schools and experiences obviously are better than others. It’s always a mistake for any of us (self included) to make our personal experience the basis for a universal claim. Another mistake we could easily make, however, is to assume that things aren’t shifting fast. You’ve been out of school for a while now (2016), it hasn’t frozen in time to be just as you remembered it.

I must admit that Jacob was right in these criticisms, especially concerning this sentence I wrote in the original post:

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.

Can you tell by the “fairly” and “decently” that I suspected that sentence may come back to bite me? After reading Jacob’s comment, I thought, “Well dang, now I have to do the ‘extensive research.’” So, I spent a month and a half doing just that.

After slow-going deep dives into the footnotes of books, I found Parents Defending Education (PDE) and their IndoctriNation Map. Here is how PDE describes itself:

A screenshot of the webpage

As you can surmise, every red pointer represents an “incident” that a parent has reported to PDE.¹ When a user clicks a state, the map zooms in to show school districts connected to reported incidents. The map has the desired effect: it’s immediately overwhelming. Before you’ve zoomed in anywhere or done any reading, you’re given the initial impression that thousands of credible incidents of indoctrination have been reported nationally. At first, I thought I’d go state by state, reading the incident reports, but it didn’t take long to find out I’d have to quit my day job to do so.

Instead, I painstakingly scraped 800 incident reports from the website² , formatted the data into two giant documents (turns out Google Docs has a character limit), and then uploaded it into Notebook LM, Google’s new AI tool that allows you to upload sources and speak to them in chatbot format³. I asked Notebook LM to provide me with incidents where Critical Race Theory or LGBTQ+ ideology was incorporated into curriculum or lesson plans. Of the five times I asked LM to do this, its lengthiest answer included 35 citations. That means LM assessed only 5% of PDE’s incident reports to be about CRT or LGBTQ+ ideas being featured in curriculum or lesson plans.⁴

That figure checked out with my experience scrolling through the IndoctriNation Map manually. The majority of reported incidents I came across were not damning evidence of indoctrination being taught in classes but reports concerned with LGBTQ+ clubs and the actions of individual teachers and students. For instance, approximately 34% of reports were concerned with clubs like the Gay Straight Alliance or Pride Alliance⁵.

These clubs are allowed to operate in public schools as much as Christian clubs and are protected by the Equal Access Act of 1984 and the First Amendment. Though most clubs need a faculty sponsor to get started, they have no connection to the school districts’ policies or curriculum. Of course, school districts’ relationships with these clubs vary, with some including the clubs in their handbook, some promoting them on their website, and at least seven of PDE’s reports mentioning districts receiving grants from the It Gets Better Project to start clubs in their schools.

Whether it be clubs or training for teachers, many reports had several degrees of separation from students. For example, one PDE report’s title mentions a curriculum that “features lessons on ‘white privilege’ and how ‘masculine and feminine are just social constructions.’” However, upon reading, it is clear that the curriculum in question is the GSA club’s. So, the report is written about a lesson from a curriculum from an optional club.

Another report’s title states a district “has presentation promoting SEL and restorative justice.” The report spends most of its time decrying the material in a slide deck supposedly created by the district’s Student Services department for a teacher’s training. So the report is about periphery material in a slide deck for a possibly optional training for teachers, of which there is no evidence had an impact on policy or curriculum.

In a final example, a report title exclaims a district “provides training to teachers that includes ‘Wheel of Privilege’ charts; teaches educators traits of ‘White Supremacy Culture’ and promotes upcoming ‘drag queen storytime.’” Again, here is another potentially optional training with material that has no evidence of being incorporated into policy or curriculum. There is a slide in the training about the Rainbow Club which lists their upcoming events, one of which is a drag queen storytime. We’re dealing with 3 or 4 levels of separation from students at this point (see figure 1)

Figure 1

After assessing each report in my sample of 30 on this metric, I found that, on average, there were 2 degrees of separation between the stated issue and the student’s daily life in the classroom.⁶ This suggests that many students are in proximity to “woke”⁷ ideology but are unlikely to be forcibly presented with it.

However, Allee's saying that “education is not a monolith” points towards an obvious caveat about regional specificity. Unsurprisingly, the state with the most incident reports in my sample was California, and in every case I examined, there were zero degrees of separation between students and said “incidents.” For instance, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction is a central test in one California school district’s ethnic studies class. In Colorado, another district has a required ethnic studies course that covers topics like anti-racism (with content from Ibram X Kendi), race as social construct, gender diversity (with a video from Bill Nye talking about the gender spectrum in a much more philosophical way than scientific), anti-trans laws, intersectionality, and a myriad of other topics the right would decry as the building blocks of the so-called Woke Mind Virus.

Personally, I think most of those topics fit appropriately in an ethnic studies class. The question is: should ethnic studies classes be required? Given the charged nature of these topics, I’d push back against the recent tendency in bluer states to make these classes required, which have commonly functioned on an opt-in basis because it allows curiosity to be the driving force behind the student’s education on the matter. I imagine the case for making them required might go like this: if you could help even one student who likely wouldn’t elect to take an ethnic studies class think critically about their racial prejudices, wouldn’t that be worth it? Statements from states or districts making this decision essentially say as much, but with much more meaningless jargon.⁸

However, the logic behind that case assumes that public schools should engage in moral education. That is a bold assumption, given how industrialization and secularization have convinced most Americans to discard the classical liberal arts education of virtues and morals and trade it for knowledge acquisition and skill development. Perhaps the past decade’s polarization and moral panic have caused the public, both left and right, to reassess this. All you have to ask a parent is, “Would you approve of your government providing a moral education to your child?” and it quickly becomes clear that the broad answer would be an enthusiastic no. If a parent desires such a thing, they homeschool or select the private school that most aligns with their worldview.

This may be the best option for a pluralistic society. If we can agree that basic moral education, at least in grades K-8, is best left to parents and private institutions, then we can keep classes like ethnic or religious studies optional. This empowers the student to follow their curiosity and opt into either one of these electives and engage in independent thinking for themselves.

Ironically, those opposed to teaching the topics covered in these classes often characterize them as info dumps that students are supposed to gulp down uncritically. Continuing to look at Denver Public Schools’ ethnic studies course, I’ll admit I was initially surprised by how far left it seemed to skew. However, upon closer inspection, the class seems carefully structured around critical thinking goals.

Consider the careful, neutral phrasings of these objectives from lesson three of the class:

• Analyze the concept of race as a social construct.

• Define anti-racism and allyship.

• Consider the role of art in advancing racial equity and healing.

Students are asked to analyze, not affirm. They are asked to define, not defend. They are asked to consider, not concur. For good measure, consider also the goals of lesson one, which states its purpose as “analyz[ing] and critiqu[ing] individualism in the United States.”

• Compare individualist and collectivist values and the extent to which they challenge the dominant narratives around us.

• Apply indigenous ways of knowing to our understanding of individualist concepts like the American Dream and the Self-Made Man.

You could argue this lesson is structured at a slant, with collectivism favored above individualism, but notice again that students are simply being asked to compare and apply concepts. As far as language is concerned, the course still allows students to form their own opinions and inevitably compare them against their own experiences and other encounters with these ideas outside the walls of their school.

I’m aware that the mere mention of the buzzwords in the above goals is enough fodder for anti-woke warriors to cry indoctrination, but that is why the optional structure of the classes matters, as well as their pedagogy. If the right’s suspicions ever prove to be true and these ideas are framed as absolute truth that must be accepted as creeds, then the public should speedily act to end it. I just haven’t found the evidence that it is happening on even a remotely systematic scale, but as a parent myself, I’ll continue to pay attention and be open to learning.

Allee was right to suggest that “things are shifting quick” and that they haven’t frozen in time since I graduated in 2016. I think we can see this as a series of reactions. Trump’s first presidency, the publishing of the 1619 Project, the murder of George Floyd, and the pandemic were all pivotal events that provoked reactions which in turn provoked counter-reactions. You might remember the great panic that arose over CRT in 2021. Online searches of the acronym increased by 83% from November 2020 to November 2021.

A search of the acronym “CRT” on Google Trends, filtered between in the past 5 years. Trends measures popularity on a scale from 0-100 in these charts, thus the 83% increase from 13 to 100 between November 2020 and 2021.

Is it any wonder that Parents Defending Education was founded in 2021? The majority of their incident reports do not reach back prior to that year. At the same time the group began tracking instances of CRT or LGBTQ+ matters coming up in schools, the conservative policy pushes like DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay bill began to rise as well. It’s Newton’s Third Law, every action has an equal or opposite reaction, applied to our culture wars in education.

From https://translegislation.com/learn

The final observation I’ll note about the findings in my sample of “incident” reports is that I found zero instances of the mischaracterizations we often hear about CRT, that it is inherently Manichaean, characterizing white people as inherently evil or that they should feel self-loathing or guilt merely because the color of their skin. I wasn’t surprised by this because today’s leading thinkers about anti-racism and CRT, many of whom are included in that Denver ethnic studies class, don’t say it either.

In How To Be An Anti-Racist, Ibram X Kendi is careful to note that the word racist is not a designation of the quality of a person but instead, a word to describe actions, ideas, and policies. A person can hold racist ideas or perform racist actions and if they do so on a regular basis, you could call that person racist as much as a person who makes bad choices perpetually eventually becomes known as a bad person. Of course, these books discuss white privilege, but that is simply a note about economic and cultural status, not a hardwired vice. Opponents are left to comment on the perceived tone of these authors because there are no such damning statements to point to. If white folks have heard a Manichean message about good races and bad races from these ideologies, they have misunderstood, likely from an unnecessarily injured ego.⁹

Whatever the issue that may be causing outrage, I tend to think children will grow up to encounter it if they aren’t already, and we can’t “Don’t Say Gay” it away. I have a friend who asked their dad what “gay” meant when they were young, and their dad replied, “It means happy.” This set up my friend for a lot of regrettable social moments. Pretending things we don’t like don’t exist does not set up children well. Mister Rogers said, “Whatever is mentionable is manageable.” I’d rather we at least have optional classes in school that neutrally mention controversial topics so students might be prepared to deal with them.

Defining Indoctrination

Let me back up and ask the question we pass up all too often: what is indoctrination? Oxford Languages defines it as “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.” Merriam-Webster provides this definition: “To imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle.”

I find Oxford’s focus on uncritical acceptance a more helpful distinction, but let’s take Merriam’s sectarian criteria into account as well.

I am a Christian raising children and teaching them my faith. We pray, we read Scripture, we worship with other Christians, and we memorize catechetical pillars like the Ten Commandments. Am I indoctrinating my children? Some would say yes. Is my teaching sectarian? Undoubtedly, yes. Do I teach with the expectation that they accept it uncritically? Admittedly, yes, while they are young, I don’t expect them to be able to do anything else. That said, I view my role as their father, beyond mere caretaking, to be a catechetical one. I fully expect them to make their own choice about following Jesus at older ages, but I want it to be an informed decision that they make without the pressure of uncritical coercion.

I mention this because we tend to judge instruction as indoctrination by subject matter alone and do not consider pedagogy (i.e. teaching methodology). Many of the evangelical conservatives in my home state of Oklahoma are very concerned by “woke” indoctrination but are completely unconcerned about State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters’ current push to bring the Bible (particularly Lee Greenwood and Trump’s God Bless America Bible¹⁰) and education about it into “every classroom.” In his initial press conference on the matter, he stated

Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and we'll be teaching from the Bible

He states that the Bible is an important historical document and elsewhere ties it to instilling patriotism. What caught my attention immediately was his phrase about teaching “from the Bible.” He did not elaborate on that, and to my knowledge, has not since. That phrase leaves a lot up to interpretation. Will the general contents of the Bible be covered and perhaps its impact on world history, good and bad? That would not be so problematic. Does it, instead, mean that morals and theology from the Bible will be taught uncritically? That, of course, would be majorly problematic for religious liberty (as freedom from religion) and could rightly be called indoctrination.

Yet, somehow, this concern does not seem to occur to many conservative Oklahomans. Why? Because, all too often, if its ideas we don’t agree with, we call it indoctrination. If it’s ideas we do agree with, we happily call it necessary education.

I find it ironic that Trump, Walters, and others assume that patriotism is an unmitigated good and should be imparted in schools and don’t see how that is not neutral and therefore a challenge to the principle of critical thinking. I understand that nations commonly instill a sense of national identity and patriotism in students. We might easily criticize China or Russia for promoting loyalty to the Communist Party or the Russian state, but fail to see how we do the same thing in the United States. I was never taught any context around the Pledge of Allegiance or its meaning, I was simply expected to daily recite it. We generally don’t see a problem with uncritical promotion of patriotism, but we don’t call it indoctrination. I simply say this to highlight how we pick and choose what to generalize and what to absolutize.

The Real Problem

After countless hours researching and writing this post, I will still posit that most of this is smoke and mirrors, shiny culture war issues distracting us from the real problems with our education system. Let us continue to watch our public schools for the emergence of sectarian teaching and coercive pedagogy, be it classrooms converted into Sunday schools or curriculums promoting specific sexual orientations or identities. That said, these are fringe issues compared to the fact that nearly the entire education system has lost sight of what makes for true learning.

I mentioned earlier that the classical liberal arts education is dead save for its monastic-like preservation in select private schools and homeschools. But for most parents, myself included, there aren’t the means to do anything other than public school.

I ended my original post saying, “I’m a proud public school graduate” and I still feel that way, but I also occasionally lament that my children are going to be sucked into a system obsessed with testing, dictated by the demands of increasingly unaffordable universities which hold so little promise for real learning or genuine career benefits. Their curiosity will hardly be encouraged and if it is, it’ll likely be by a book which teachers are requiring less and less of as basic reading comprehension continues to decline. Over-testing will likely force them to fit into a mold which is unnatural, uncomfortable, and psychologically damaging. They will spend twelve years being prepared to take more tests, learn restrictive essay formats that no one reads, make meaningless responses on online threads, and to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars for a piece a paper that in no way guarantees in a livable wage. At the end of it all, they may have little civic education or love of learning.

This education system is outdated, doesn’t work, and we all know it. But we’re just yelling at each-other about overblown, fringe cases of so-called indoctrination. If there is any indoctrination going on, its the one promising our students so much and delivering so little.

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1. I must note that I cannot vouch for the authenticity of any of PDE’s “incident reports.” Initially, I tried to corroborate each report I read by finding one or two other mentions of the “incident” online. That simply became too much of a task for me to undertake. On the positive side, many of the reports feature screenshots of emails, slide decks, websites, and other sources mentioned in their stories. On the negative side, while they flimsily claim to be non-partisan, it doesn’t take long to see that is not true. Of all the categories you can filter the IndoctriNation map by, religious liberty is not one listed. By that I mean there are no reports about the encroachments of religion upon students and their right to freedom from religion. Also, it’s worth noting that while parents do seem to reach out with perceived incidents, the organization also doggedly seeks them out. Many reports begin with “Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to [blank school district] regarding [insert “woke” issue here]. It would seem that when this young organization began it quickly began submitting similar public record requests across the country.

2. I used a popular website scraper, Octoparse, for this. This was a big learning curve for someone who knew nothing about web scraping. I spent hours scraping this data alone.

As far as I’m aware, the full number of reports is about 800. Octoparse scraped up to 1,200, but it listed the difference as duplicates. Due to limitations of the tool and my time, I cannot confirm if those were genuine duplicate reports or if they simply shared keywords or phrases with other reports and were, therefore, inaccurately considered duplicates.

3. I know, I know, Gemini has told people to eat rocks, but this product, co-developed by author Steven Johnson, is something else entirely. A user may create a notebook, upload any sources they desire, and then speak to those sources as a chatbot. The chatbot will provide the user answers with clickable citations that hyperlink to sections in the uploaded sources. If you’d like access to this particular notebook, please DM me and I’ll provide the link. Unfortunately, Notebook LM doesn’t allow you to post notebooks publicly as of now and only allows sharing directly with individuals.

4. I shouldn’t need to mention this, but I emphasize that this was Notebook LM’s assessment. As I get into in the next footnote, Notebook LM’s powers lie in his qualitative analysis, not its quantitative analysis, so the 5% can be taken with a grain of salt as my best effort to make sense of what the tool provided me. The point is that a low amount of overall reports are considered with curriculum or lesson plans.

5. Arriving at this number was difficult because Notebook LM is built to answer qualitative inquiries, not quantitative ones. It could only tell me about 14 incident reports about clubs, but I knew there were much more. To find a more accurate number, I keyword-searched the raw data for “club(s),” “Gay Straight Alliance,” “GSA,” and “Pride Alliance.” I got 409 hits. Assuming an average of 1.5 keyword mentions in each unique report, I divided 409 by 1.5 and got 273, which would be 34% of 800. As you can tell, it’s an imperfect stat, but it’s the best I could get without quitting my day job to count and analyze. Look at AI, not taking my job, but helping me keep it 👍

6. This mode of assessment is not a perfect science, especially since the amount of degrees is somewhat subjective and could be debated in many cases. As for arriving at an average of two, I simply went column by column on this sheet, recorded the number of degrees (low-balling when I came to one with a range, ex: “3-4”), and then averaged the total number.

7. I put the word woke in quotes because I’m referring to the right’s projected meaning of the phrase, not the original meaning. For years, the right simply said “social justice,” but perhaps harping on that positive and clear phrase became counterproductive, so they switched to “woke” because its meaning is not immediately clear and, to the untrained ear, neutral at best and therefore ripe for redefinition and weaponization. The original phrase was coined and used by African Americans to refer to social awareness, particularly an awakening to racial injustice. However, the term has been co-opted with a negative charge to refer to almost anything on the left that might inspire conservative outrage, perhaps most commonly in reference to transgenderism and the left’s gender ideology. Judging by the original phrase’s meaning, that is a dishonest and bad faith usage. Alas, I do accept that language is fluid and ever-changing. Every time I type it in reference to its new co-opted meaning, I do so while cringing, but I’ll continue to do it in quotes as my most feeble act of resistance.

8. Here are some:

• “Ethnic studies courses play an important role in building an inclusive multicultural democracy.” — California Assembly Bill No. 1460

• “By teaching the histories and contributions of all people, Ethnic Studies will open more pathways for teachers to engage with, relate to, and understand diverse students. This bill could go a long way in keeping more students of ethnic and social minorities engaged and activated in school. This is one clear way to close the racial achievement gap in our schools.” — 2017 Press Release Oregon House Democrats

9. I’m sure someone will read my tone in this passage as condescending and/or elitist and say I’m asking them to be blind to something that is supposedly right before their eyes. But we have to operate on evidence. I welcome anyone to point where these leading voices (not fringe exceptions) say white people are inherently evil or should feel guilty about who they are.

10. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/10/04/donald-trump-supported-bible-one-of-few-that-meets-ryan-walters-criteria-for-ok-classrooms/75510021007/