“But can we please admit that many four year colleges do in fact attempt to indoctrinate students? And that a lot of Americans, including President Obama, regard that as a good thing? … It is nevertheless true that institutions of higher education generally value reason more than faith; they value intellectual achievement more than moral achievement; they’re implicated in America’s careerism; they advance a whole host of value judgments under the banner of diversity, some of them uncontroversial, others deeply contested; and if the typical American college was more like Hillsdale or Notre Dame or Bob Jones than Harvard in its value judgments, I cannot believe President Obama would be equally enthusiastic about subsidizing them. Am I wrong?”
—
This is pedantry at its best.
All education is transformative. No one is born believing a darn thing.Your parents, your church and your community all install ideas and beliefs and faiths in you. College comes late to the game, and can only provide those students who care to develop them with the skills and tools they can use to challenge and/or reconfirm those faiths.
Put another way, let me ask this: is society likely to be healthier, stronger, more flexible and more capable of adaptation to the world’s inevitably changing social and political shape if it is filled with people who are comfortable and capable of wrestling with complexities to the fullest extent possible, or not? Is a community likely to be more successful or less successful if it embraces the capacity to develop new knowledge and perspectives over time, or if it keeps people as permanent 6 year olds, having learned everything they needed to know in kindergarten?
Despite the ethos of the Facebook era, not everything one sees or reads is supposed to reconfirm your existing biases. The world has an intriguing way of upsetting one’s apple cart with regularity. The important thing is to be able to think of a way to resettle it, not just pout that things didn’t go the way you wanted them to. (Politicalprof)
Conor Friedersdorf
Let’s hear it. Is Conor wrong?
(via theatlantic)
Yes. Also, if I were a Notre Dame alum I’d be fairly offended at being lumped in with a racist institution like Bob Jones.
(via markcoatney)
All the above needs to be said more regularly, more forcefully, and with increasingly greater conviction.
If by “indoctrination” you mean convincing students that facts and empirical evidence matter, that critical reasoning is crucial, and that understanding multiple points of view (even while still disagreeing with them) is vital to future success—then, yes, I’m wholeheartedly in favor of indoctrination.
Let me give a concrete example. Several years ago, while a visiting professor at Dickinson College, I taught a seminar called Democracy and Its Discontents. Here’s they syllabus. The course spent several weeks on each of three main ideologies: liberalism (which includes free market liberalism), socialism (including Soviet communism), and fascism (including both Italian and German variants). The readings included a number of primary texts from the various ideologies. The three weeks we spent on fascism were particularly interesting, since I assigned my students to read excerpts from Hitler, Göring, Mussolini, Rocco, and a host of other past (and current) fascist ideologues. In fact, I also took an entire class day (we only met once a week) to show my students the entire Triumph of the Will in a large auditorium on the campus’s largest movie screen. The purpose of my course was not to convince anyone to become a communist, a fascist, or a liberal. Instead, the purpose was to force my students to directly confront all these ideas—and their claims to represent “the people” (a core element of “democracy”)—directly. I wanted my students to watch Triumph of the Will in its entirety so we could alter discuss, in detail, how Nazism could have been so appealing to so many people.
I hardly consider what I do “indoctrination.” I call it fostering critical thinking. In fact, what I do is the reverse of indoctrination—since I explicitly ask my students to question their preconceptions. In other words, I ask them to deconstruct the “indoctrination” they had prior to arriving in my classroom.
One of Conor’s chief mistakes in the quoted portion is that he considers Harvard this temple of Leftist thought, how naive but cute is that?
