Families, communities, and nations
are stronger when the rising generation is taught correct principles, true
history, and how to find truth. Elementary and secondary school children are in
school approximately six hours per day and five days per week for nine months
out of every year. A problem arises, however, when parents allow other people
to have extended influence on their children. How are parents to know what
children are being taught?
Church leaders and socialists agree
that early childhood is the time to teach/indoctrinate society. King Solomon is
credited with the saying, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when
he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). So, how do we know if a
child is being taught good principles and skills or just being indoctrinated?
Why is it important to make sure that children are being taught properly?
Teaching is the tool for education.
A teacher is an authority figure that teaches ideas, principles, and knowledge to
other people. Education is the process of learning from a teacher. For teaching
to take place, there must also be learning on the part of the student.
According to Auguste Mevrat, “indoctrination happens through many channels – entertainment, speeches, and
censorship – but its main instrument is the school system. Teachers have a
captive audience of malleable young minds for several years. They may not have
figured out how to make students smart and productive, but they can at least
make them submissive and obedient.”
I have been pondering a question
that I read recently that goes something like this: “Who has been teaching the
rising generation to hate America?” Who told our children and teenagers that Christopher
Columbus was a terrible person? Who convinced our young adults that George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Founding Fathers were
not good men and should not be held in a place of honor? Is this what our children
are learning in public schools and universities?
What kind of liberal garbage is
being fed to our young adults on college campuses? I recently saw a chart showing
82% of college professors are liberal and 18% of them are moderate. There are
few, if any, conservative professors on most college campuses. How can young
adults learn to compare liberalism and conservatism when they are taught only
liberalism? Is it a coincidence that young adults are the ones pulling down
statues and destroying monuments to our Founding Fathers?
According to Mevrat, “Curriculum
should help guide the teacher to create lessons and use materials that will
train the students to think and function independently. Instead, most public-school
curricula … do the opposite.” He then explained why he considers Common Core to
be indoctrination.
Common Core has facilitated progressive
indoctrination by smothering independent though and stifling intellectual
development. It effectively trains students not to think by emphasizing skills
over content, process over product, and relative standards over absolute ones.
Mevrat indicated that all areas
suffer. In the humanities, studies “focus on teaching supposedly practical
skills rather quality content.” Students are assigned journalistic nonfiction
and taught research skills rather than “reading great poetry and literature.” “Instead
of reading for meaning and writing clearly, students read for bias and learn to
write fluff.” History is one of the areas that suffer the most because students
are taught “everything except remembering actual history and synthesizing
information.” This means that “both literary and historical content is drained
of relevance or meaning. While students learn to process data, they do not
think about anything in particular.”
Math and science are hurt more by Common
Core’s obsession with the process over the product. Reaching the right answer
means little in Common Core math. It is more important that students learn
various arbitrary methods through which they can arrive at an answer. Students
receive more credit for following a needlessly complicated breakdown, complete
with color-coding and an array of abstract terms, for relatively simple computation….
Mevrat wrote that “some students can make
their way through the Common Core curriculum without knowing much math or
science at all,” and they stop thinking because it is meaningless. This brings
about “a pervasive relativism in education.”
…Content is interchangeable, and mastery
is either illusory or impossible. Knowledge becomes subjective. One text is as
good as another. One period of history is as important as another. One theory
or formula is as useful as another. It is hard to learn how to think when there
is nothing real to think about.
In such a system, thinking is only the
articulation of opinion; it has no bearing on truth. This means that people don’t
really need to think critically and understand why they believe what they do.
They just need to have the right viewpoint and force others to conform like they’ve
been forced to conform. They engage in arguments where the loudest voice wins
because no one’s points are better than another. They pressure instead of
persuade.
This, in turn, leads to tribalism – groups
of people united in feeling and opinion, but not in reason and truth. The lack
of thought makes all these groups vulnerable to mass media and prevents any
organized resistance to an encroaching state or lawless ideologue in power.
Indoctrination is complete when perception (i.e., whatever is on the screen,
whatever an “expert” says, whatever is popular) really does become reality for
most people because they’re too stupid or apathetic to respond rationally.
How can we reclaim the rising the
generation from the indoctrinated masses? Mevrat said that the “only real solution
to indoctrination, then, is good teachers. These good teachers include “parents,
mentors, and other knowledgeable adults” who “train students in methods of
thought while supplying the stuff of thought. They teach a person to evaluate
an argument properly, find actual solutions to problems, and determine what is
true and what is false.”
We need to look for – and be – the type
of teacher that does not promote “one ideology over another” and “trust [the]
student to reason through to the right position…."
Only clear thought will be the death of
foggy indoctrination. If people want to pass on their ideas on to the next
generation, they should focus on building up logic, not just giving them the
right texts to read and TV shows to watch. The goal should be to understand the
reasons, not follow the signals of the right tribe.
At some point, indoctrination will always
collapse on itself and leave mediocrity in its wake. Teaching, by contrast, is
what will sustain our culture and bring out its virtues. It fosters the
presence of active thought – not uniform thought – and it is what will
ultimately mend and civilize our sorely divided country.
It is our responsibility to make sure that
the rising generation is taught and not indoctrinated. By seeking out good
teachers for our children, we can strengthen our homes, communities, and nations.
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