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Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.
by Quillbert182 5y ago
Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoDid you read the article? Because there's a paywall. If you didn't, can you explain what you mean?
- generalizations 5y agoI saw no paywall. I'm guessing you aren't using an adblocker.
- syshum 5y agoAt this point the evidence is pretty clear that is the case.. well maybe not "indoctrination" but for sure many many school systems do not share the value system of the parents sending their kids to the schools The question then becomes who's value system should "win", IMO it should be the parents, the parents should have the final say in their child's upbringing not the schools or "community".
- thesuitonym 5y agoI would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.
- syshum 5y agoGood parents should do this, but from what I see this is not what is happening in modern schools. It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse. Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. That is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
- com2kid 5y ago> Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. People have been saying this about schools since forever. FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book. 9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around. 10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time. 12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing). 8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s. 7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death." 8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats. 6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
- notriddle 5y ago> People have been saying this about schools since forever. It's been true since forever. > FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. Those are the values that schoolteachers publicly espouse, but even if they want to live up to it, they can't. It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse. > [the rest of the anecdotes] Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
- artificialLimbs 5y agoI don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.
- crooked-v 5y agoSerious question: do you feel that critical thinking is important and should be taught in schools? If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties. In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
- Inityx 5y ago"Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases
- artificialLimbs 5y agoIt's a good aim. It's not something you can necessarily encode in law.
- michaelmrose 5y agoEvery environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up. The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
- artificialLimbs 5y agoIt's true, but it's a good aim.
- ertjaet 5y agosure! facts like: - unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power - including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity - communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority
- colechristensen 5y agoTeaching children does not attract the best and brightest, to be blunt. Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse. >they should come to their own conclusions And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then? Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists). I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
- creato 5y agoAnyone banning legos in the name of equity values creativity and intuitive understanding of the interactions between physical objects less than their ability to brainwash their students, and thus has no business teaching children. The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity. My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- devwastaken 5y agoSchool does not challenge beliefs. It teaches you not to do that at all, and to respect inefficient unreasonable government systems. U.S. schools don't even teach your basic constitutional rights. They intentionally block that because if people knew their 5th amendment rights the vast majority of policing wouldn't work. Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
- michaelmrose 5y agoWe absolutely covered constitutional rights, covered civil rights, and several shitty parts of America's and the worlds history. I don't know how you could possibly believe that teachers just show up for coffee club and free money. Many people even most want to do a good job at whatever it is they are doing because they are intrinsically motivated. Those who choose education are doing a job that requires substantial investment in education and ultimately in working time to earn a modicum of money. In general people interested in those terms have a greater than average chance of being there because of giving a damn. Your analysis is shallow in the extreme.
- munk-a 5y agoHell, I was in High School during 9/11 and my principal lost her son in the explosion... Social studies that year heavily featured discussions on the US's involvement in the middle east, opposition to the russian occupation of Afganistan and the constitutional complications of a lot of the laws we saw coming out to fight terrorism. I think I got an absolutely wonderful education on US governmental systems that year - it was just dry Jeffersonian dialogs.
- devwastaken 5y agoTeachers become teachers not out of passion for teaching but because it is the easiest path to go through if you follow the designed education system. Highschool pushes university hard, university pushes teaching, and teaching is a default path if you're scared of getting skills in anything else. I have met very few teachers whom have life experience outside of being a teacher, and it makes them mindless drones that, yes, collect a paycheck and hand out assignments from Pearson or some other company. Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.
- dmonitor 5y agoI don't think the goal of these teachers is to challenge their beliefs, unless they start enforcing right wing libertarianism on the left leaning kids
- solveit 5y agoMore to the point, the parents will win. They'll send their children somewhere else.
- jeromegv 5y agoWhat if the parents believe in god's creation of the universe and the science teachers want to teach evolution? Or vice-versa?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Quillbert182 5y agoThis is slightly off-topic, but I would like to point out that the belief that God created the universe and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. I believe what you mean is Creationism, which is the belief that God placed everything exactly as it currently is and that creation will never change.
- syshum 5y agoYou can list 100's of topic for which people will disagree with each other on how children should be educated. I still believe it should be in the parents corner. That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.
- Layke1123 5y agoAs a child of parents who did no have my best interests at heart, I'm going to whole heartedly disagree. I learned much better how to be from school than I ever did my parents.
- throw__away7391 5y agoEven as someone who was put into an extremely strict religious school specifically to be indoctrinated with views that I now detest, and who generally takes a dim view of parents' knowledge and ability, I'm inclined to agree with this. I think there is significant value for children to share the value system of their parents while they are growing up, even if they later reject those values. Parents are more likely than teachers to have their children's best interests in mind.
- majormajor 5y agoIn the places I've lived, those school systems have locally-elected folks running them. It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws... Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years... I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!
- einpoklum 5y agoIndoctrination is when you're inculcated with a doctrine. That's not what happened with the children described in the article. But if you mean affecting children's values and social outlook, then indeed, teachers do that. Sometimes they do it unconsciously, in which case it's typically the prevailing social values, explicit and implicit, which children are imbued with; sometimes it's more conscious.
- adamrezich 5y agohow is this not what happened here? children were playing with legos, adults step in and mandate how play should occur based on their observations and the values they think the kids should develop. the way they describe how the kids play with legos—looking for the "cool pieces", feeling ownership over things they built—is the default way that all kids end up playing with legos in a group setting. somehow we all turned out okay without anyone dictating morals and values into lego play of all things.
- christkv 5y agoThey must experience lego equity (s). Everyone gets exactly the same pieces and nothing more.
- crooked-v 5y agoExcept that's explicitly not what happened.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MattRix 5y agoone glance at the current state of society makes it pretty obvious that “somehow we all turned out ok” is not true.
- michaelmrose 5y agoIt isn't actually remotely clear that our species or civilization will actually survive and the number one threat in 1000 different aspects is our failure to consider our individual actions in context of the rest of us. I wouldn't say that we turned out alright at all.
- Breazy 5y ago> " Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive." I share your take-away in general. But at least in this case though, the parents of these kids probably [publicly] align with the ideology of the teachers, although I think it's reasonable to suspect many of them privately have other opinions (I derive this belief from the fact that these are affluent white families who chose to send their kids to a primarily white and affluent after-school program. These families may talk the talk, but are they walking the walk?) > Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.
- polished85 5y agoWhat would "doing the walk" look like for these parents?
- Breazy 5y agoNot going out of their way to put their kids into ethnically and culturally homogeneous environments.
- Aeolun 5y agoI’m not sure if that’s fair. This may be the only afterschool program around, and have a representative percentage of children from all ethnicities in the neighborhood (e.g. mostly white). I think it’s more likely they didn’t go out of their way to put them in more diverse environments.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- drewcoo 5y agoSo it's not vocab knowledge on the part of the parents? Because a teacher's job is literally to indoctrinate.
- Aeolun 5y agoI mean, yes. That’s why we send them to school right? So we don’t all have to do it ourselves.
- TeeMassive 5y agoYou deconstruct the concepts of parents and raising their kids and teachers only to conflate them as one and the same because both are shaping the minds of human beings. The problem is that they do not have the same scope and responsibilities even if they are note entirely exclusive. The teachers of the article clearly overstepped their bounds and the trust most parents have in teachers not to shape the mind of children with political beliefs.
- cortesoft 5y agoSeems like a loose definition of indoctrination... is any teaching indoctrination by your definition?
- baryphonic 5y agoOh, this is densely packed with indoctrination, but it's skillfully written so as to seem half normal. Here's a simple heuristic: if a teacher presents a false proposition as truth, is corrected, and has the epistemic humility to revise what she teachers, she's not indoctrinating. A student would have an easier time disproving the Pythagorean theorem, the Heliocentric model or even the history of slavery than convincing these teachers that they were wrong. The former claims are all at least contingent on evidence. Read this article carefully. At every occasion, she is projecting her beliefs and judgments onto the children. There is no amount of evidence that could falsify her conclusion. It's pure, unadulterated blind faith. Whenever the kids reject the teachers' assertions, the objection is categorically interpreted as evidence of how "ingrained" into the kids' psyches capitalism, inequality and the rest of the parade of horribles are. Pay particular attention to how "Drew" is framed, the kid who evidently was a leader in this group. He's very hesitant to accept the teachers' judgments, and only does so after significant argument. When he does, he is praised for toeing the Party's line, and shortly thereafter the kids are given the legos back, with significant restrictions. Again, these are framed as if the kids actually agreed to "all houses must be the same" (I almost want to try to impose this rule on my kids - I imagine I'd be stepping on many fewer Legos, though time vegging out in front of Netflix would probably increase). But given all of the other admissions against interest that the author makes (including that the teachers didn't want to impose authoritarianism and so they took the legos away), I imagine these were not at all open-ended discussions, but were strongly manipulated by the teachers to achieve a certain outcome. The author isn't the first socialist to preach the gospel about control over the means of production who nevertheless treats the demos as if they are incapable of managing without her help.
- cryptonector 5y agoI love that heuristic.
- 5y ago
- jacknews 5y agoThe teachers approach can easily be framed as simply keeping order in the classroom, and giving kids different perspectives and so on, which is fine. But the author themselves seem to have a clear political position, that power and privilege, and even property, are unjust. Perhaps that's true to some extent, but the point should be pressed on adult society first, not snuck through the backdoor onto the upcoming generation.