They like to get you in a compromising position
“Authority Song,” John Mellencamp
They like to get you there and smile in your face
They think, they’re so cute when they got you in that condition
Well I think, it’s a total disgrace…
I fight authority, authority always wins
As an educator for 40 years who doesn’t grade or test, I hate to do this, but let’s start with a pop quiz (and the worst possible kind, multiple choice):
In the US, where are children being indoctrinated?
- public schools
- their homes
- their churches
- all of the above
Let’s add another just for fun:
When children are indoctrinated, what ideology is being imposed on those children in the US?
- Liberal
- Conservative
- Both
- Neither
I’ll let you ponder those while you read, now, because the point here is to work our way to these answers.
I want to start with a few stories of my life and time as a public school English teacher in my small hometown that is very conservative and mostly fundamentalist Christians.
As I have written often, my childhood was nearly as idealistic as I recall. My parents were fun and doting—lots of play initiated by my parents and lots of formative engagement with my parents that lay the foundation of my becoming an academic, an avid reader, and a writer.
But, well into my late teens, I lived under the possibility of physical violence and anger from my father—although what I call “violence” was pretty mild compared to the beatings that were seen as normal in the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
My point is that I was raised in a household where the authoritarian/patriarchal norm was supported by corporal punishment.
By adolescence, however, I had recognized in myself a strong aversion to authority. My father’s credo, “Do as I say, not as I do,” taught me the opposite of his intended lesson.
I came to loath hypocrisy and authority-for-authority’s-sake.
In the privacy of my room, I listened to George Carlin and Richard Pryor for hours and began to read voraciously. The result was that by college, I had become a completely different person than my parents, than almost everyone in my hometown.
I toyed with rejecting religion in high school (even as I was elected president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes my senior year), and then, I did the embarrassingly aggressive atheist routine for my first few years of college.
Ironically, although I rejected much of what my parents taught me directly and indirectly—their heavy smoking, their subtle and not-so-subtle racism, etc.—college taught me a lesson similar to my father but completely unlike my father’s mandates; in college I learned to shut my mouth an listen.
I was well into my thirties before I could recognize the distinction between authoritarian and authoritative (Paulo Freire), but that was my journey away from conservative ideologies (authoritarian) and toward liberal ideologies (authoritative) grounded in the sanctity of the human mind and the glorious possibilities of ideas most often found in books.
By the end of college, I had dedicated myself to being a teacher and a writer, always reading multiple books at a time.
My missionary zeal, then, worked in a different way than what I had witnessed growing up in a small rural town in South Carolina; I took a position in that hometown high school determined to give my students the opportunity to find their own minds, their own intellect, and not embarrass themselves as I had if and when they went off to college.
Being a teacher in a conservative small town in the South introduced me to the indoctrination paradox, in fact.
Nearly daily, I was the one being accused of indoctrination even as I had chosen to teach directly as a rejection of indoctrination. Of course, those most adamant that I was indoctrinating were the most fundamentalist people in town who were terrified of a diversity of ideas, who were the first to try to ban books, who were convinced of their own certainty in a way that was terrifying.
I have hundreds of examples, but one situation stands out to me to this day.
A beautiful part of teaching literature is that novels open the door to ideas and class discussion.
Having students read Kurt Vonnegut or Margaret Atwood, among many others, often led to discussions of free will, but when I would note to students that it defied logic to assert that there is an all-knowing god and human free will, many of my most conservative and religious students would have melt downs in class (this occurred also when we read The Scarlet Letter and confronted Original Sin).
For many of my students, my class was their first experience with questioning ideas and coming to their own understanding as opposed to simply accepting the authority of what their parents or churches told them was the Truth.
Increasingly over my nearly two decades as a public school teacher, I had homeschooled students transfer into our public school, and as a college professor at a selective liberal arts college, I teach a significant number of homeschooled students.
The subset of homeschooled students who often fit inside very conservative and fundamentalist Christian ideology was similar to those experiences while I was a K-12 teacher, but often even more pronounced.
I enter my year 40 as an educator this coming fall. For my entire career (and what I have explored as a historian of education), universal public education, books, and independent thought have always been under attack—especially from conservatives and Christians.
However, the most recent wave of book bans and curriculum gag orders focusing on CRT and chilling charges that LGBTQ+ materials are grooming children is a level of ugliness I never really expected.
The indoctrination paradox is gaining momentum because the end game of Christian conservatives is not to eradicate indoctrination or grooming from public schools, but to have complete control of indoctrination and grooming.
If you want to know what that end game looks like, take a peak inside the world of Christian conservative homeschooling: The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers by Peter Jamison.
These are the chilling highlights but you’d do yourself a service to read the entire piece, carefully:
Corporal punishment, aversion to different ideas, a fear of books, and, most chilling of all, “to reshape America according to biblical principles.”
This is the America being built in Florida, where the governor claims that book bans are not book bans.
So here is the disturbing answers from the opening pop quiz.
The first answer is “4. all of the above,” and the second answer is “2. Conservative.”
And that is the indoctrination paradox.
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