Indoctrination in College
To those in college feeling the pressure of one-sided political or other forms of indoctrination, you should know about this website. You can post criticisms of particular faculty members or their courses. The faculty have the opportunity to respond. Then people can decide for themselves. Let me know if you do post there and I'll read it.
www.noindoctrination.org
www.noindoctrination.org
posted by G.Rap | 9:47 AM
3 Comments:
Dr. Rap –
With all due respect, I am surprised that you have posted a link to this website. Of all my high-school and college courses, the ones I took with you have been the most ideologically indoctrinating. When I was in your class, you frequently made arguments and statements that ramified into the realm of morality, religion, and politics. While you allowed students to dissent, you employed your greater knowledge and mental ability to outwit and discard those opinions. Furthermore, you rarely developed major intellectual arguments that differed from your own, except to create a straw man to then tear down. Of course you sincerely hope to teach your students “the good;” but professors are no different: they too want to make their students into engaged and moral citizens, though they may have a different idea than you about what constitutes the good. Isn’t your form of moral engagement in the classroom—especially given the inchoate, gullible and ill-informed nature of high-school minds—even more a form of “indoctrination” than that of a professor who lectures about the evils of capitalism (or for that matter its glories) to a class of jaded college seniors?
-Dancing with the Daffodils
I welcome the question from "Dancing." I agree that my teaching might well be called indoctrination. But not ideological indoctrination. To educate in true doctrine and to impose false doctrine are two different things. (Nor would I agree that I teach any one narrow doctrine, though I confess I am rigid about believing in the reality of the human necessity of distinguishing between good and evil.)
And I don't agree that all professors
want to make their students into "moral citizens." Moral means more than either ideologically pure or politically correct. I'm very glad to hear that my course "ramified into the realm of morality, religion, and politics." It should. Literature is about life, not about some abstract world separate from morality, religion, and politics. But I do not think that my manner of teaching split the world into the good guys and the bad guys, those who agreed with me and those who did not. I hope my classroom is more about the shared experience of learning, even though I clearly espouse a point of view. A teacher who does not hold some things to be true and others false will be a dull and shallow teacher indeed. The question is where truth lies, and I hope I never cause any student honestly pursuing such a question to feel excluded from the conversation the way many students in college these days seem to feel, as evidenced by the website I linked.
See next post for my response to the responding comment.
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