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Thou Shalt Not! When education becomes indoctrination (and how to avoid it) By Paul Regan
I
was only about eight years old, but I can still vividly recall the moment. I was sitting at my desk in my little South London Catholic primary school in about 1962. Our formidable Irish teacher had just finished going through the Ten Commandments yet again, demanding that after she enunciated each one of them, prompted by a rap of her feared cane on the desk, all thirty five of us should repeat them after her with sufficient volume and conviction. After repeating commandment number six, this time for me it was somehow different. Innocently, I raised my hand, and when challenged, I asked her the meaning of ‘adultery’, since it made no sense to me to be told not to commit something I had no understanding of. The response was immediate and chilling. Sent to the Headmaster’s office, I received 3 strokes of the cane on my hand and spent the rest of the day standing in the corner of the class, temporarily excommunicated. My innocent desire for an explanation had been mistaken for heresy and subversion. I recalled this memory recently after reading that the British Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, had circulated new guidelines to teachers in state schools advising them how to avoid political (not religious) bias. A few weeks earlier, one English primary school had made the front pages after it was revealed that students had been encouraged by their teacher to write letters of complaint to the Prime Minister. The complaints, generously laced with pie charts and bar charts, were suspiciously sophisticated and biased for primary age children and a teacher plot was uncovered. In the same week, schools in another education authority run by the Green Party had been instructed to teach Critical Race Theory, a hugely controversial ideology which asserts that even young white children are guilty of unconscious race bias, and, regardless of how poor they might be, they are necessarily heirs to white privilege and power. Suddenly, indoctrination in schools was back on the political and media agenda as if it was somehow a brand new phenomenon. Further up the education food chain, in a bizarre turning of the tables a respected academic and author, Professor Kathleen Stock, was recently hounded out of the University of Sussex by her own students after she gave a reasonably argued refutation of certain dogma around trans rights. Her offence must have been her failure to indoctrinate
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her students in the way they had come to expect. Religions, politics, and ideologies come and go, but what remains constant is the desire of competing groups to fight out their proxy battles in schools. Huge assumptions, biases, prejudices, utopian fantasies, fear-mongering, unproven assertions and dodgy statistics are presented to children every day as facts and theories. Claims such as ‘The science is settled’ pepper our modern discourse and leak into the school curriculum, and are repeated ad nauseam until they cease to have any meaning. It is not so different from teaching the word ‘adultery’ to eight year olds, whist refusing to explain it. We all know that teachers, mostly without realising, indoctrinate us because we have all been subjected to it in some form during our own schooling, and then perhaps spent years trying to reeducate ourselves away from the harm it has caused us. Conversely, we can all remember the teacher who bucked the trend, helped us to think for ourselves, justified every knowledge claim with a reason, a proof or a counterclaim, and educated rather than instructed us. We regard many others of our teachers as having wasted our precious time. Those of us who teach or have taught in international schools may
