Indoctrination

The recent squabble about President Obama's speech for schoolchildren scheduled for today has been fraught with controversy. Right-wingers are up-in-arms, claiming that it's dangerous for Obama to be given such a platform to speak "his message" into the lives of the young and impressionable, claiming that they don't want their children "brainwashed" or "indoctrinated." Left-wingers have replied with astonishment, claiming that all the President wants to do is encourage our children to work hard in school, not "indoctrinate" them in some liberal viewpoint.

While this wildfire is obviously fueled by the out-of-control partisanship in our nation's politics, it has given me pause to reflect on the concept of "indoctrination."As long as I can remember, "indoctrination" has had negative connotations, usually alluding to something akin to brainwashing, which conjures up images of fascism and/or religious cults, but more readily applicable to mainstream ideologies, e. g. liberalism, conservatism, Evangelicalism, or Catholicism. And, of course, kids are always the ones held up as the potential victims of indoctrination. Parents don't want their kids indoctrinated.

What's at risk, apparently, is these kids' freedom to think and choose for themselves whether they might be more democratic or more republican, more Christian or more atheistic, etc. To my mind, however, this "freedom" is largely a ruse. Humans learn through interaction with other humans: both directly, as through conversation; and indirectly, as through reading and the media; either actively, as through explicit, evaluative assertions; or passively, as through omitted sentences, word craft, and propaganda. And at the level of the child, it seems to me that all of this interaction could be viewed as indoctrination, taken to mean the teaching of a particular ideology. Even the statement "I don't want my child indoctrinated" stems from a particular ideology whose doctrine is passed on through human interaction. Simply put, there is no human interaction ungoverned by ideology.

What is more valid for a parent, however, is the desire to monitor and filter those voices which reach one’s child. I would imagine most parents would want their children to hold a similar ideology to their own and are subsequently suspicious of the barrage of voices modern children encounter which may prove sufficient to topple a parent’s influence. There is some good in this, most especially because many such voices today are unfiltered (for example, this blog).

So, what about the Church? Does the Church hold to an ideology? Of course. Does it seek to hand that ideology on to young people? Absolutely. Is this a bad thing? One’s answer to that question depends on what ideology/ies one has been indoctrinated in. But to pit a freedom of thought ideology against it is doomed to fail, for it becomes, in the end, self-defeating.