Liberals indoctrinating kids. What an amazing piece of projection. It's the other way around. Conservatives (as well as churches) are the masters of manipulating the information we get when our brains are most plastic. Give me the child and I'll give you the man.
I am the proud owner of a three-digit IQ, and yet I emerged from Webb City High School sincerely believing that the U.S. had been the "good guy" on the domestic and international stage all through its 200-year history. It was us against the evil King George, the evil Kaiser Wilhelm, the evil Nazis, the evil Tojo, the godless Commies. Amazingly, every time, the good guys triumphed over evil. Even the Civil War was a victory for the good guys in the Union (I had no idea that our state was for all practical purposes a Confederate state).
There was never any mention of our imperialism. No mention of the "false flags" we used to start the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War. The many many atrocities committed in our names against Native Americans, Blacks, Filipinos and Japanese. The Korean War, which we basically lost, wasn't studied. It was a fact desert. College is where I began to learn about the inconvenient truths. Where I was assigned to read books like Hiroshima and the Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Making of a Quagmire.
That fact deprivation wasn't an accident. Somebody was shaping the "history" we learned. I'm not sure who was pulling the strings in Missouri at that time, but you can see the process proudly, nakedly on display right now in Texas. https://www.aacu.org/article/the-whitewashing-of-history
A lot of our classmates didn't get to have the experience we did. In addition to never learning to think critically, they're also still fact deprived. Both factors are why so many are Republicans and why Trump got 70+% of the vote in our former Congressional district. 53% of college-educated voters identify as Democrats while 40% identify as Republicans. That is not a coincidence.
Nothing just happened, not our woe-begotten education and not the ignorance we see now. When your school is more interested in reaffirming what you believe to be true, you get us. If we are lucky, we make it to college where we get our real education. Mine mirrors Stan’s.
Yep, same for me. I graduated in History from a Jesuit university. A required book was Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. It savaged the Catholic church's role in Medieval times. One day after class, I asked the prof, Father Murphy, about the incongruity of using that book. He looked at me and said "If it isn't the truth, it isn't an education".
I think you're right. I also have a strong impression that you're a superb teacher.
But my response tends to be different. I think that's there's indoctrination at universities, though less than in undergraduate schools, through advertising, and in families.
When I taught economics I was in fact trying to indoctrinate students to become skilled, well-informed, and honest economic thinkers, whether in reading news or deciding how to vote or receiving investment decisions under uncertainty and across time. I had colleagues indoctrinating students indoctrinating students to develop and use chemistry and biology and visual arts and German-speaker and so many other toolsets and perspectives.
Society specifically asks that public schools indoctrinate students to be "college-ready" or "prepared for the workplace," and often to be this or that sort of citizen. Quite overtly.
Commercial advertisers seek to indoctrinate recipients as consumption-oriented and as consumers of their products. Families indoctrinate their children as members of societies, in roles they think advantages or inevitable.
In economics, I certainly met economists as teachers and as colleagues who were putting across their perspectives through honest argument or by slipshod sneering. Since I went to and taught at relatively balanced institutions, I experienced this from both leftie and righty economists.
But there are a lot of voices out there. Your goal, and my goal, and what I think should be the goal of everyone, is to help children and adults of all ages, including ourselves, to develop into alert, informed, curious, and honest readers of our complex universe and all the many arguments occurring about it.
Oh, amen. Have your beliefs/approaches firmly in place. And be prepared to explain them and if necessary, change them. I came to my adulthood with firmly-held beliefs that, upon challenge, didn’t hold up for me. So I changed them. I never want to think I have the absolute answer, in religion, in economics, in the way I bake my bread. When I stop challenging myself, I intend to drop dead where I am and make room for someone else. If I can teach that? I WILL be a superb teacher. And thank you.
Having attended college during the tumultuous early 70’s I cannot recall one instance where any of my professors pushed ANY ideology! As I look back I could not even figure out what party they were registered to.
I had a college professor college who’d once served as a Democratic state representative and the only way the students knew was they looked him up. He was too busy teaching them how to think, not what to think.
Not to be cheeky but, speaking for myself, if this indoctrination by liberals thing was true then I think the country (and world) wouldn’t be in such a mess. It’s really a matter of addition or subtraction. Should you know more or less before you decide for yourself? I vote more.
There's an old joke among us professors: Indoctrinate? I can't even get them to do the reading. (We are a wild bunch, I'll tell ya.) Too often telling the truth now gets viewed as evidence of indoctrination into a radical mindset. This has become particularly difficult in recent years. I teach a course on political communication. Every semester now some of my students call me biased in their anonymous reviews. This is despite a lot of in-class discussion that neutrality is neither possible nor desirable if it was. But the things I get accused of being biased for now are simply stating facts about Trump's racism and corruption, the violence at the Capitol on 1/6, the increasing nonsense of the G.O.P., the fact that the election was NOT stolen, etc. etc. I also call out Dems and liberals on their nonsense when they fail, but conservative students don't seem to be paying attention when I mention those things. And, if I were to pretend that there is some equivalence between those parties in 2022 I would just be lying. Which is worse than being biased.
Liberals indoctrinating kids. What an amazing piece of projection. It's the other way around. Conservatives (as well as churches) are the masters of manipulating the information we get when our brains are most plastic. Give me the child and I'll give you the man.
I am the proud owner of a three-digit IQ, and yet I emerged from Webb City High School sincerely believing that the U.S. had been the "good guy" on the domestic and international stage all through its 200-year history. It was us against the evil King George, the evil Kaiser Wilhelm, the evil Nazis, the evil Tojo, the godless Commies. Amazingly, every time, the good guys triumphed over evil. Even the Civil War was a victory for the good guys in the Union (I had no idea that our state was for all practical purposes a Confederate state).
There was never any mention of our imperialism. No mention of the "false flags" we used to start the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War. The many many atrocities committed in our names against Native Americans, Blacks, Filipinos and Japanese. The Korean War, which we basically lost, wasn't studied. It was a fact desert. College is where I began to learn about the inconvenient truths. Where I was assigned to read books like Hiroshima and the Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Making of a Quagmire.
That fact deprivation wasn't an accident. Somebody was shaping the "history" we learned. I'm not sure who was pulling the strings in Missouri at that time, but you can see the process proudly, nakedly on display right now in Texas. https://www.aacu.org/article/the-whitewashing-of-history
A lot of our classmates didn't get to have the experience we did. In addition to never learning to think critically, they're also still fact deprived. Both factors are why so many are Republicans and why Trump got 70+% of the vote in our former Congressional district. 53% of college-educated voters identify as Democrats while 40% identify as Republicans. That is not a coincidence.
Nothing just happened, not our woe-begotten education and not the ignorance we see now. When your school is more interested in reaffirming what you believe to be true, you get us. If we are lucky, we make it to college where we get our real education. Mine mirrors Stan’s.
Yep, same for me. I graduated in History from a Jesuit university. A required book was Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. It savaged the Catholic church's role in Medieval times. One day after class, I asked the prof, Father Murphy, about the incongruity of using that book. He looked at me and said "If it isn't the truth, it isn't an education".
Hear hear. Well said, Stan.
I think you're right. I also have a strong impression that you're a superb teacher.
But my response tends to be different. I think that's there's indoctrination at universities, though less than in undergraduate schools, through advertising, and in families.
When I taught economics I was in fact trying to indoctrinate students to become skilled, well-informed, and honest economic thinkers, whether in reading news or deciding how to vote or receiving investment decisions under uncertainty and across time. I had colleagues indoctrinating students indoctrinating students to develop and use chemistry and biology and visual arts and German-speaker and so many other toolsets and perspectives.
Society specifically asks that public schools indoctrinate students to be "college-ready" or "prepared for the workplace," and often to be this or that sort of citizen. Quite overtly.
Commercial advertisers seek to indoctrinate recipients as consumption-oriented and as consumers of their products. Families indoctrinate their children as members of societies, in roles they think advantages or inevitable.
In economics, I certainly met economists as teachers and as colleagues who were putting across their perspectives through honest argument or by slipshod sneering. Since I went to and taught at relatively balanced institutions, I experienced this from both leftie and righty economists.
But there are a lot of voices out there. Your goal, and my goal, and what I think should be the goal of everyone, is to help children and adults of all ages, including ourselves, to develop into alert, informed, curious, and honest readers of our complex universe and all the many arguments occurring about it.
Oh, amen. Have your beliefs/approaches firmly in place. And be prepared to explain them and if necessary, change them. I came to my adulthood with firmly-held beliefs that, upon challenge, didn’t hold up for me. So I changed them. I never want to think I have the absolute answer, in religion, in economics, in the way I bake my bread. When I stop challenging myself, I intend to drop dead where I am and make room for someone else. If I can teach that? I WILL be a superb teacher. And thank you.
Argh, I should have said "less than in elementary and high schools," not "less than in undergraduate schools." :D
Weirdly -- as always, when great minds meet -- that's how I read it. I wonder what's wrong with me? (Rhetorical question.)
Well for starters, no wait. Rhetorical, right. Never mind.
Ha. Thank you.
Having attended college during the tumultuous early 70’s I cannot recall one instance where any of my professors pushed ANY ideology! As I look back I could not even figure out what party they were registered to.
I had a college professor college who’d once served as a Democratic state representative and the only way the students knew was they looked him up. He was too busy teaching them how to think, not what to think.
Intellectual curiosity be damned.
Not to be cheeky but, speaking for myself, if this indoctrination by liberals thing was true then I think the country (and world) wouldn’t be in such a mess. It’s really a matter of addition or subtraction. Should you know more or less before you decide for yourself? I vote more.
Far more before you decide for yourself. Far, far more than I knew when I started out, in fact.
There's an old joke among us professors: Indoctrinate? I can't even get them to do the reading. (We are a wild bunch, I'll tell ya.) Too often telling the truth now gets viewed as evidence of indoctrination into a radical mindset. This has become particularly difficult in recent years. I teach a course on political communication. Every semester now some of my students call me biased in their anonymous reviews. This is despite a lot of in-class discussion that neutrality is neither possible nor desirable if it was. But the things I get accused of being biased for now are simply stating facts about Trump's racism and corruption, the violence at the Capitol on 1/6, the increasing nonsense of the G.O.P., the fact that the election was NOT stolen, etc. etc. I also call out Dems and liberals on their nonsense when they fail, but conservative students don't seem to be paying attention when I mention those things. And, if I were to pretend that there is some equivalence between those parties in 2022 I would just be lying. Which is worse than being biased.