Hard Indoctrination, Soft Indoctrination, and the Books that Change Us

By David Swindle

There are few problems as misrepresented or misunderstood as that of indoctrination in American schools. I went through my own schooling as a “progressive” undergraduate and wrote a 90-page thesis on indoctrination blasting David Horowitz for his claims about professorial practices at my alma mater, Ball State University (BSU.) I am writing about it now, after having had second thoughts and joining the Freedom Center’s Academic Freedom Campaign.

Looking back at my own education from the vantage point of four post-graduate years in the University of the Real World, I still wonder: Did I experience indoctrination as an undergraduate political science and English double-major at BSU? Once, my answer would have been an adamant “No.” My professors were professional. None subordinated their teaching to their politics or attempted in a blatant fashion to impose their prejudices on their students. Many went out of their way to argue contrary views and even preface their remarks with,”Now understand that just because I argue a point it does not mean I believe it.” I was never assigned neo-communist propagandist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or instructed to study it as though it were the Bible.

My answer now is different, though. After debating the question of what constitutes indoctrination for years, it’s clear to me that “indoctrination”does not just include the extreme examples that Horowitz frequently used in his trilogy The Professors, Indoctrination U and One-Party Classroom. (Horowitz’s reason for emphasizing these outrageous cases is that if one cannot grasp that extreme examples of classroom indoctrination are detestable then the more subtle examples will be all but invisible.)

In One-Party Classroom Horowitz defines “indoctrination” in this fashion: “Indoctrination takes place when professors teach a point of view that is contested within the spectrum of scholarly or intellectually responsible opinion as though it were scientific fact.” He then admonishes: “Professors should make their students aware that such opinions are contested, and must not teach their point of view as though it were fact. Students should be provided with materials that would allow them to draw their own conclusions about contested positions.”

This is a definition I would have accepted if it had been put in front of me when I was an undergraduate. I certainly embrace it today now that I see that there are two kinds of indoctrination students, parents, and everyone concerned with high education should consider, which I will call “hard” and “soft.”

In cases of hard indoctrination the professor himself is a willing abuser of the academic classroom and traducer of students’ academic freedom. He sets out to indoctrinate students and to recruit them to his political cause. He takes a page from Italian Stalinist Antonio Gramsci’s playbook and sees the university as a “means of cultural production” that must be captured for the revolutionary agenda. He decides that he will utilize his classroom as a political venue. The purpose of his teaching is not to promote an academic inquiry and inculcate an intellectual curiosity and scholarly skepticism. His goal is to to fix the world by instilling a “progressive” sensibility and perspective in his captive student audience.  Hard indoctrination is an entirely conscious choice. It is indoctrination by malice.

By contrast, professors who practice soft indoctrination do so largely unconsciously and would never think of forcing their students to make their political views match their own. The professor’s fault is weighting his course with leftist or “liberal” texts that he believes represent a consensus of respectable possible views on a given topic and either failing to give adequate time to conservative views or not treating them as legitimate. David Horowitz discusses the case of one such professor above. This academic represented the  liberal Warren Court’s transformative decisions without adequately presenting the conservative and libertarian objections. By and large this is indoctrination by ignorance and misdirection.

Looking back at my own education, I have to conclude that the syndrome Horowitz discusses is unfortunately quite common. Yesterday I pulled one of my English major textbooks off my bookshelf — Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature by David H. Richter — and flipped through the table of contents. Several names stood out with fading yellow highlighter behind them: Helen Vendler, Gerald Graff, Terry Eagleton, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Janice Radway, Alan Purves. With the exception of Himmelfarb, a well-known neoconservative, mostly Marxists and neo-Marxist radicals.

Did my professor intend consciously to propagandize me and my classmates by assigning us such a work? I don’t think so. But that does not mean he could not have provided a much better educational experience if he had not been burdened by the pieties of the Left and unable to see past its dominance of his discipline. Will bell hooks with her mantras about America’s alleged white supremacist capitalist patriarchy really help undergraduate English majors learn how to analyze texts? Is she really consequential? Or is she actually there because she’s a black woman expressing chic, leftist dogmas?

In assigning this book and these readings my professor was doing one thing quite well: introducing me to the current culture of literary studies at the collegiate level.  In this culture, Gramsci has triumphed; a chic (if somewhat vulgar) Marxism has thoroughly embedded itself within the discipline, as it has virtually all of the liberal arts in Academia. One cannot prepare to become a professor of English without reading a lot of Marxist texts. That’s what the field has been transformed into during the last 40 years. Given such a situation, a soft indoctrination in the classroom is an inevitability.

So what’s to be done about it?

Dealing with soft indoctrination is in many ways easier than the hard variety. And here’s why: in the university the student has tremendous freedom in shaping his education. In the writing of papers and the selection of texts the student is quite capable of introducing authors of his own choosing into the discussion. Professors who fall into the soft indoctrination category might not bring conservative texts into the discussion on their own but given their view of themselves as thinkers committed to open and objective scholarly inquiry (however benighted such a conception may be) they are not likely to aggressively oppose such texts because to do so would be a challenge to their amor propre.

So my advice to students: if the reading list is one-sided or excludes views that dissent from the leftwing orthodoxy bring this statement to the attention of your professor and ask him to introduce intellectual diversity into his curriculum. If he refuses, take it upon yourselves to widen the range of the classroom debate.

This is the first step in what will be a generational struggle to restore educational values to the academic curriculum. If students can open the curriculum to diverse views now they will do it when they’re the professors and administrators decades hence. The goal is not to make the liberal arts conservative, but to make them truly liberal, again — apolitical, skeptical, and non-ideological. This is a task that may take a long time, but in the process of attempting it you may just get yourself a quality education.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 8:42 amand is filed under Adopt a Dissenting Book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.