The word “indoctrination” has been coming up a lot recently, oftentimes referring to education. In some quarters, there’s a lot of concern about what students are learning in schools, and in some cases, who’s teaching them.
Colin Dickey writes about conspiracy theories and tackled both the history of this concept and the current debate about it. His piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education is called The Specter of “Indoctrination”.
Dickey joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Colin, one of the things you write about is that this is not a word that’s been in use for a very long time.
COLIN DICKEY: Right. I found it really fascinating because it’s such a key word right now, and it gets used so often in political conversations and in conversations about education and higher education that it seemed a kind of bedrock idea about how we viewed education. But when I looked into it, I found that this was not always the case, that for the longest time, indoctrination did not have a particularly negative connotation.
It was used by the military primarily to just describe the orientation of civilians and to military life, of how they became acclimatized and accustomed to military procedures. And that’s just what indoctrination meant. And it wasn’t spun as a negative thing until the postwar era, really, until the 1940s and ’50s.
BRODIE: Well, so what happened at that time that led people to start using it as maybe a more nefarious activity or something to be avoided and afraid of?
DICKEY: Right. So what happens — and it’s really fascinating — is in the Korean War, we start to see American prisoners of war who are being recorded saying things that look like they might be in favor of communism. Maybe they are turning their back on American ideas and capitalism, and people start to get worried that the communists have developed some kind of brainwashing technique.
And so we start to talk more and more about this idea of communist indoctrination, this idea that people can be subjected to a conditioning that will change their beliefs from something pro-American and pro capitalism and in line with our values into something that seems very alien and foreign to us. And so this idea that communist indoctrination is happening — could be happening overseas with our soldiers who have been kidnapped, but may also be happening at home — really starts to take off.
And sooner or later, indoctrination ceases to need that communist adjective before it’s just sort of anytime anybody believes something we — “we,” broadly speaking — disagree with, we start to wonder, “Oh, have they been indoctrinated somehow?”
BRODIE: Do you get the sense that for folks who are using that word now — especially as it relates to schools and education — do they believe that there is some kind of conditioning going on like what was alleged to have been happening during the Korean War? Like that there’s some kind of some kind of strange program happening here that is sort of brainwashing students? Or is it something else that they’re referring to, maybe just a presentation of information or perspectives with which they disagree?
DICKEY: I mean, it’s really hard to know for sure what people actually believe, but I do think the rhetoric is pretty consistent. When people talk about indoctrination in the schools, what they mean is that children are — and even college students, who are adults — but students are emotionally and ideologically vulnerable, and they are being subjected to a belief system that they wouldn’t otherwise adopt by teachers and professors who are using secret tactics — either pressure or something akin to brainwashing — into teaching children and college students to believe something they wouldn’t otherwise believe.
BRODIE: What is the line between indoctrination and, I guess, believing that somebody can change their mind on things or have an open mind to consider perspectives that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise consider?
DICKEY: You know, I think if you look at how the rhetoric is used, that line is if “I agree with it, it’s not indoctrination. And if I don’t agree with it, it is indoctrination.”
So what I looked at in the piece that I wrote for the Chronicle was specifically looking at the college students who were engaged in in protests regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza and how a lot of people online, a lot of commentators were accusing these students of having been indoctrinated, despite the fact that this is a broadly held opinion by all sorts of Americans of all ages and of all education levels.
So it really seems to be the case that people use the phrase indoctrination to describe a phenomenon when students believe things that they don’t agree with.
“If we disagree, then we are indoctrinating dangerous ideas.” — Colin Dickey
BRODIE: For folks who are saying that, how do they sort of mesh that with the idea of learning new things and expanding your horizons and maybe taking on perspectives and and agreeing with things that maybe you hadn’t agreed with before?
DICKEY: I don’t find it particularly ideologically consistent the way it gets deployed. I think that indoctrination has become a word that has such negative connotations that it gets used quite sloppily by people. And so there is a lot of hypocrisy. And I think that spans the ideological spectrum.
You see it a lot with right-wing commentators who will talk about, on the one hand, we need to save our students from being indoctrinated with socialist values and then simultaneously say we need to instill values of love of country and patriotism and capitalism. And it’s very clear that instilling is sort of the same method as indoctrinating, but one of them is positive and one of them is negative.
And of course, you see this on the left, too, in a different set of values. And once again, it is a question of if we agree with the lesson being taught, we are instilling good values. If we disagree, then we are indoctrinating dangerous ideas.
BRODIE: One of the things that you write about, which I thought was really interesting, was this idea of even if college professors wanted to indoctrinate their students, do they even have the power to do that? Is it even possible for them to do that? And the conclusion it seems that you drew is it’s really not possible for a variety of reasons, right?
DICKEY: This is the thing I find quite ludicrous about the whole argument is this idea that college professors are indoctrinating young people with these dangerous ideas, where if you talk to anybody who’s teaching college right now — particularly since the pandemic, particularly since you know, there was a year or two of online instruction — professors will across the board tell you they can barely get students to show up to class. They can’t get students to do the reading.
And it’s sort of unclear how they can exert this Svengali-like ideological pressure over students who are struggling to engage in sort of basic levels of function at the university — of showing up, passing classes, doing the reading, taking tests. We are operating in a very different landscape right now.
Students have had a hard time. Students have a hard time adjusting back to the life of college, and college professors are struggling to meet students where they’re at. And I think the idea that college professors have this ability to do this nefarious kind of brainwashing is a laughable nonstarter given given the reality of what college is today.
