So California’s governor Jerry Brown signed a bill mandating that students in the state learn that gay, lesbian, and transgendered people exist and have made noteworthy contributions to the country. I gather that the antagonisms toward the bill have ranged from opposition to it being the California legislature mandating the content of the curricular materials to hostility toward the subject matter itself. Kevin Ryan describes the bill as public school indoctrination, convinced that the bill’s language of “reflecting adversely” will mean that “instructional materials must positively promote ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans’ as role models and that children as young as 6 will be taught to admire homosexuality, same-sex ‘marriages,’ bisexuality, and transsexuality.” I didn’t catch any of that from reading the text of the bill, but I guess we’ll see how it plays out in textbook publishing and instruction in the classroom. My money’s on not happening.
I’m going to conveniently put aside my fringe opinions about education policy and focus instead on Ryan’s concerns about indoctrination. Let’s say for argument’s sake that public education really does involve indoctrination. If that’s the case, what’s to be done? Change public education policy, sure, but that’s a daunting, long, arduous road. And there’s little guarantee that traversing this path will bring change one can believe in. What options does a concerned parent have in the meantime?
Now I say the following as someone who believes in a handful of doctrines: If you’re a parent fearful of indoctrination at your school system, teach your child/children to see through indoctrination. Teach the boys and girls to think—critically and with a healthy dose of suspicion. Most kids already have the interrogative foundation for critical thought: they ask “Why?” and “How come?” to every statement some supposedly learned person makes. My son is fond of asking “How do you know?” whenever I tell him something—anything! He’s a budding epistemologist going into Kindergarten.
Seriously, this youthful inquiry is something to nurture and develop into a mature critical inquisitiveness and passion for knowledge. I sometimes fail at this, telling my son to shut up instead (in nicer words) because, quite frankly, his constant questioning is as annoying as Bieber fever. So he needs to learn discretion. We’ll work on that. He’ll need that too. His teachers will probably teach him things with which I’ll disagree. Okay, we reside in Texas; his teachers will definitely teach him stuff I think unfit for a sound mind or even for the recycling bin.
Whatever the content of my children’s education (of course, I want it to be good), my primary educational goal will be that my children learn in time how to think—how to understand and not just repeat. I intend to work with them as they learn the ways of the world and what unfortunately passes for the ways of the world. When my children hear a lesson that contradicts what I’ve taught them (or plan to teach them), I don’t want them to raise their hands and just repeat what I’ve told them or sit quietly thinking my Dad would disagree with this. I want them to learn how to weigh evidence and assess the soundness of arguments. I want accurate thinkers, not repeaters. Heck, I’d prefer them to be mediocre thinkers to outstanding repeaters.
Thinkers are better equipped to deconstruct indoctrination. Mine included. (VN)
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