In my last post, I came out in favor of indoctrinating our young. If some of my readers were surprised, they had probably assumed that I’d never advocate something as malevolent as shaping the perceptions and values of children. But let’s be honest. Indoctrination happens, always. It’s an inevitability, right along with death and taxes. Trying to avoid it is not only a fool’s errand but a failure of responsible living. We should not be asking whether to indoctrinate but what and how to indoctrinate, and when to take our foot off the pedal and let auto-indoctrination take over.
The what, as I wrote last month, is an awareness of the historic crossroads we occupy, a regard for each other and for the habitability of the planet, and a recognition that force and cruelty are flawed tactics for resolving conflicts.
The first of these requires us to develop a historical sensibility. That means grasping the inevitability of change, the interaction of human events, and the significance of large numbers. Most children aren’t cognitively ready for this combination until they are 9 or 10 years old. More about historical sensibility later. Indoctrination in the latter two can begin in the first years of childhood.
Modeling
The best way to instill a regard for living things is to model that behavior ourselves. The same is true of teaching the rejection of force and cruelty. Indoctrination through modeling is by no means easy or even natural, but it’s a duty that must be answered, even though it means acknowledging our own lapses. If we model hypocrisy, the results will be disastrous.
Along with modeling, we need stories — stories of the kind that Aesop and the Brothers Grimm told. Such stories can play an extraordinary role in developing the superego. They also let us model the act of reading and offering observations along the way. Of course, age-appropriate movies are also excellent, as they are stories amped by imagery.
Here a caveat is necessary. Stay away from Bible stories! They introduce a hogwash cosmology that children will have to reconcile later, and they set up a punitive super-being whose wrath becomes the undergirding of all moral behavior. Such stuff is mind poison. On the other hand, I see nothing wrong in talking about the parables of Jesus, so long as he’s portrayed as “a wise man who lived long ago.”
Historical Sensibility
The key to explaining this idea is context. History is, after all, the arrangement of events in a temporal context. Sadly, our schools butcher context. They offer up history in disjointed courses, and even then, the courses are limited to political and military history, with a dollop here and there of cultural and economic history. But what about the history of time (a la Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin), religion, government, mathematics, science, technology, economics, ethics, and the arts? All of these kinds of history interact with one another and produce a multi-dimensional picture of humankind across time.
There’s much to say about each of these histories and not much space to say it in, so I’ll focus on just two, science and economics. The history of science has this shorthand: observation -> explanation -> prediction -> new observation -> contradiction -> new explanation -> new prediction, and so on. This process of refinement answers the question, “How do we know what we know?” Because we are living in an era of dishonesty on a massive scale, that question has become urgent in our civic and social lives as well. We can address it only by insisting that historians, journalists, and the mass media adopt a professional rigor akin to that of a scientist. If I were a teacher, I’d raise this issue in my history of ethics class.
The history of economics is about who does the labor; how and by whom labor is compensated; who owns the workplace; how laborers and owners relate to each other, to their communities, and to their government; how much domestic wealth depends on colonialism and cheap foreign labor, and whether the systems thus defined are sustainable. Among the systems that arise from these questions are tribal communism, slavery, serfdom, mercantilism, capitalism, Marxist communism, socialism, social capitalism, and what some call “Benioff capitalism,” named after Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com. Benioff capitalism is a new phenomenon that was endorsed by 181 CEOs at the recent Business Roundtable. It asserts that stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, and communities — are as important to a corporation as its stockholders are.
Our Challenge
It’s a travesty that no public school system offers a hologram of entwined histories as a gift to its graduates. Instead, they get a burden, the burden of starting an adult life barely moored to the past. If the past is prologue, then that prologue is for us a cupboard, sparsely stocked with both truths and lies.
The development and education of our children must adopt a new, methodical kind of indoctrination, one that is kinder, more truthful, and more effective in producing thoughtful adults. It’s an existential imperative.
The Scratching Post 