There is a way to stand head and shoulders above any teacher at your school.
Not that that’s the goal, mind you.
But I assume it is your goal to get the most out of your students, to see dramatic improvement, to propel them out into the summer months different than when they showed up at your door.
You can do this. It’s entirely possible for anyone to be that rare teacher every parent longs for their child.
The good news is that it’s now easier than ever before.
You see, education has become indoctrination. It’s become teaching students what to think rather than how to think.
It used to be that teachers would take pains to ensure their personal beliefs and political views were never revealed, thus allowing students to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
No more.
The shift to outright activism is nearly complete, with teachers unapologetically believing that it’s their duty to promote what they arrogantly believe is right. Taxpayers be damned.
The result is a generation of students—66 percent of whom can’t read at grade level—spouting shallow platitudes based on omitted truths, simplistic ideas, misguided emotions, and zero depth of understanding of history and the people who lived it.
In the meantime, it’s what they’re not learning that is causing them to fall so far behind. Now more than ever, this gives you an opportunity to catapult your students at least a year—often more—ahead of their peers.
And it’s not difficult. You just have to do one thing:
Eschew the advocacy and focus exclusively on academic skill. Yes, that means reading, writing, and math. (The arts, when in support, also have great value.)
Make every subject and every lesson an exercise in getting better in these core areas and your students will gallop far, far ahead of their peers. Practice, practice, practice every moment. Get a little better every day.
Improve their ability and intelligence through skill acquisition. Expose shallow thinking with Socratic questioning.
Rely on original sources and the great thinkers and philosophers of history from all stripes, creeds, backgrounds, and viewpoints.
Do this and your students will be able to make their own decisions on what is best for country, community, and their fellow citizen.
They’ll be able to read and discern. They’ll be able to collect, apprehend, differentiate, distinguish, identify inconsistencies and filter it all through their own life experiences.
They’ll be able to plunge deep into issues, nuzzle up to the truth, and become independent thinkers, historians, and literate defenders of their beliefs and ideas rather than parrots who crumble under light questioning.
It goes without saying that classroom management and defending your students’ right to learn and enjoy school comes first. It’s also understood that your curriculum itself likely pushes one-sided ideas.
So you too need to be learned.
You need to be shrewd and scrutinizing. You need to question skeptically and embrace logic over feeling and emotion.
You need to be a rebel who swims against the tide so you can present to your students not just the arguments, but the moments and movements that produce their rise.
If debate strengthens understanding, then let your students do the research and create the arguments themselves. And then have them switch positions.
As impartial referee, your job is to ruthlessly refuse to accept half truths, lazy slogans, sound bites, gooey pablum, or anything else that isn’t well researched, thought out, and rooted in the foundations history. (And never the rewriting of it.)
You can be a staunch liberal or conservative in your personal life. Capitalist or socialist.
But if you can set aside your views the moment you enter the parking lot, and be of good courage, you won’t believe what you and your students can accomplish. You won’t believe the impact you’ll have.
Staggering. Transformative. Life-changing.
Your students may slink stoop-shouldered into your classroom in August as clueless vessels uninterested in learning—because they’ve never truly experienced it—and exit bold and educated, confident they can discover what they believe no matter the issue.
All on their own.
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I love this! Thank you for encouraging us to pursue greater things!
P.S. I still think social media based on your blog would be of great benefit to us 🙂
I believe your assumption of the indoctrination trend is insulting and continues the mass misinformed view of educators. This is not what I have experienced throughout my twenty-seven year carrer, but a more recent trend.
Career***
Agreed! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I strive everyday to avoid doing this in my 8th grade ELA classes! I thought my eyes had deceived me when I read this, “You see, education has become indoctrination. It’s become teaching students what to think rather than how to think.” When given the opportunity to share their views, I find myself pleasantly surprised at how profound my students are. It would be a travesty to try and push my point of view onto even one of them.
I must completely disagree that indoctrination is a recent trend.
Where I live, it seems the “education reforms” started being taught to educators in earnest about twenty to twenty-five years ago, and I have traced the earliest pushes for most of them back about at least a century or more.
The difference now is that unlike the old guard, who tended to focus on time-honored education methods that actually worked and on respecting others’ right and freedom to think for themselves, today’s new educators tend to accept the message that, as I was told in university about seven years ago, “Teaching is not neutral; it is political,” that we should act as political agents of change on behalf of the state while supposedly also teaching “critical thinking” (which as taught to us is really just a method of bringing students around to our predetermined conclusions), and that we should take upon ourselves some of the roles of moral and ethical influence that traditionally belonged to the family, with our doing so supposedly justified due to the modern breakdown of the family.
I also experienced this teaching approach intensely implemented in my college studies about twelve years ago. Well-reasoned dissenting opinions were hardly ever seriously considered by instructors, only tolerated with a superficial, “Thank you for sharing that,” then they moved right along.
I had one unforgettable university education instructor who openly talked about being a political agent of change himself, and how he and those in his movement actively scanned the groups they taught for “dissenters” and dealt with them to shut them down. I later experience this approach as a teacher at an education conference run by an influential North American firm. Reason and fair debate weren’t important; winning their point was paramount.
No, this is not exaggerated in the slightest. Yes, I live and did my training in North America!
Michael is one of those few educators brave enough to tell it like it is, and I applaud him!
I don’t even understand what you are trying to communicate in the first sentence. Please explain. (Assumption of the trend? Insulting? Mass misinformed view of what?)
I think she is tring to say that as a veteran educator she resents the suggestion that she herself has been indoctrinating students. She thinks it is “insulting” to all the teachers who have not been, or believe they have not been, indoctrinating students. The “mass misinformed view” again is of the teaching profession being filled with indoctrinators. I think this teacher understands that teaching is not easy and that many already have a dim view of teachers and of our education system. But I think she is being overly-sensitive. We all know if we strive to be objective and fair-minded. Not all teachers are indoctrinating students. But many are and many have been more a long time.
Indeed.
Agreed. The vision of teachers indoctrinating kids is a cloud figure. Teachers who share personal views need to back off, but there is no system wide push to make kids think red or blue.
I teach civility, and content, and free thinking kids.
From someone with 31 years as a classroom teacher, I agree with Mr. Linsin 100%. I taught my first 27 years in a blue state (WA), and then I moved to a red state (TN) after deciding I may be able to escape the indoctrination blasted from ALL levels from the state DOE to the classroom. I did escape it. I won’t say the indoctrination doesn’t occur in my new state, but it certainly isn’t as prevalent and in-your-face here.
It’s a shame that teachers have lost professionalism and now teach whatever leftist, Marxist, or unscientific extremist belief they personally think is so critical. But what’s more shameful is how many teachers don’t want to, but are too frightened to speak up. Let’s be honest, if you lost your job you could go make more in almost any other field—even as a manager at a fast-food chain. Would it really be so bad to stand up against your school board in support of your students if it meant you had some sense of honor at the end of the day?
Michael,
While i didn’t enter the teaching to “fight back” i did enter it for exactly the same reasons you cite (with a personal twist to bring in my 25+ real world experiences to business classes). However the tides you believe we should swim against are here, and it’s more than ignorant to ignore the pernicious effect they are having on our children’s future and craven to try and explain them away. Bias is prevalent everywhere – including private industries, for example “journalism”, etc., too. IMO you are right on the money here.
So what exactly can we say when “preferred” pronouns become “required” pronouns? I know this is going to come up as well as the whole violation of female student’s right to privacy/safety in bathrooms and locker rooms. I won’t engage in compelled speech. I think it’s wrong to lie about biology and the nature of the human person and their gender. I don’t believe untruths serve compassion but result in greater confusion for students and ultimately do them and society a grave disservice. Language is being hijacked and intellectual vandalism is in vogue. With older students you can have them research these but younger ones are at the mercy of their indoctrinators. Teachers who reject this will have the screws put to them by the academic elite. I’m not saying we shouldn’t stand up for ourselves but would like ways of addressing this. I’m at the point where the chips can fall where they may. I’m not going to be complying.
Susan,
You are awesome.
So true.
It’s great to hear people who actually see students as humans, not mouthpieces to espouse pseudo-righteous ideals.
Teach them how to think. If they learn that, the rest will fall into place by itself.
Thank you so much for this much needed reminder of what is really needed for our children to be successful. This is such an encouragement to me as I’ve been questioning myself and my own beliefs as I constantly am told in my school what to believe. You have taught me this morning that I’m not alone in my thinking after all! I really needed to hear this!
I could be woefully mistaken. It sounds like you’re advocating mis-gendering people.
I wonder if you’ve ever been willing to consider that nearly 2% of the world’s population is intersexed. Aprroximately the same population as those with red hair or those with green eyes both of which are not seen as abnormalities in need of denying nor “correcting.” Also consider there are multiple different markers for one’s biological sex which include but are not limited to one’s genitals, homornal responses, chromosomes, etc. There are not distinctly 2 biological sexes, rather a range of biological sex varying just as other things within the body vary from person to person with the most vital of anatomy varying the least and the least vital to the individual’s survival varying the most.
Gender is separate from biological sex, as it is the social assumptions about one’s biological sex, which again there are not 2 boxes. It might not be as much of an issue if people would cease attempting to put what lies on a spectrum of variance, biological sex, into 2 confining boxes merely for the sake of “ease,” tradition, previous lack of information and mistaking confusion for a learning curve.
How would it be if I just call you San instead, since those letters ARE part of your name? It is a lot easier for me, less work. Even though you know how you feel comfortable being called and who you identify as … it’s too confusinf for me because I know Susans and I don’t think you’re really a Susan. I think you look more like a San. I mean, you sound like a San and look like one. I mean you’re not REALLY a Susan, com’mon.
I wouldn’t do such a thing other than to give a somewhat similar example which doesn’t even come close to what it feels like when someone mis-genders someone. But it does highlight the willful determination to further abuse someone because WE know the other person better than them and we refuse to change how we were operating in the past.
And while I know these comments are most likely falling onto unwilling ears, it really isn’t you I speak to because you’ve already made your point clear. Rather it’s to the others who will CHOSE to be open-hearted enough to stop, listen, consider, realize and grow.
Thank you, Nathan!
Your 2% has been debunked a while back. See all the intersex articles on PubMed which provide the actual stats of those who specifically meet the chromosomal intersex qualifications and do NOT include other medical conditions which doctors often don’t differentiate from and you’ll find the percentage you are looking for is .018%. So – there’s male, female, or the .018% that phenotypically cannot be determined. That’s not much of a spectrum. You are proving the point of the author that research and acquiring information is a skill that needs to be more emphasized!
Well said! I whole-heartedly agree!
This comment about pronouns has nothing to do with how teachers approach teaching their subject matter. I do not know why the comment was approved. I am wondering if you have ever spoken with a students who is asking to be addressed with different pronouns or different names. Have you had a family member who has asked for different pronouns or different names. Have you seen the emotional toll on a child who is gender nonconforming who isn’t accepted. The suicide rate is high. How can we support students emotionally if we refuse to listen to them? I am grateful that I work in a school where students are supported when they ask for different pronouns or different names. Last year, once a student made this request and saw teachers trying that student came out of their shell and started to participate more in class. It is sad to see this viewpoint expressed by people who work with children.
It’s extremely disappointing to see this sort of transphobic fear-mongering in the comments. How, exactly, does calling a student by the pronouns they choose harm anyone? It doesn’t and goes a long way towards making transgender students feel comfortable in school. Teachers are in schools to help kids. If they are actively against making their students feel safe and supported, they should not be teaching.
Thank you very much
Thank you very much Nathan, well said.
If a teacher can’t grow and adjust their awareness to the changes/needs in society, it’s time to get out of the classroom. Period.
The arts, when in support, also have great value.)
As a Music educator of 31 years, I find this comment very disturbing. The arts have great value period! Everything we do in learning music supports attention, craftsmanship, resilience, and self-assessment, not to mention listening skills, reading ability and vocabulary building.
Yes, but most of us do not teach music during math class. Quite often we include the arts in history, math, and science. But to say this article is in any way implying that we should scrap music class is just being fearful. Plus without the music period, I wouldn’t have a prep and my students would suffer from it. 😉
Who has a prep ?? Not me! Meetings every single day.
Art stands on its own for teaching independent thought. In fact, for many students, art is their time to think critically and make thoughtful assumptions about their place in history. In many art programs, original sources are used albeit visual ones but visual language is a valid language skill. There is more value for the arts than simply being a planning period for the “more important” teachers. OUCH…..
Totally agree with the ouch! I am unsubscribing and planning to find alternative newsletters that value the arts and teaching the whole human being.
Thank you for having the courage to stand up for logic, reason and what we need to be focusing on for our students’ success. I agree with every word. My goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. To do that, I give them the tools they need to be able to think: read, write, do math, learn history and science that is unbiased. I continue to appreciate your blog. I know you will get much criticism for stating the truth.
I believe we are in the era of postmodernism in which there is no absolute truth. This is a very uncomfortable mindset which embraces uncertainty in a society in constant flux and changing beliefs. This will be challenging to navigate.
Thank you for being a source of reason in an increasingly crazy world!
Michael, I didn’t think you could get any better and then each week I’m pleasantly surprised when you do. But this post is really over the top awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
(You did leave out science though.)
Thank you!
Ps- Please consider doing a series of writing about how to be best equipped to do this. I know I would benefit greatly from it!
I appreciate this article, Michael!
Hurrah!!
I have heard so many people disparaging education recently, but I didn’t think I’d hear it here. “Education has become indoctrination”…I’m surprised that you actually believe that. As if we aren’t all working harder than ever to help our students make up the losses in reading, writing, and math that they sustained last year.
I do see several of the same problems you point out. My students do struggle with writing research papers because they tend to latch onto the first article they can find online without analyzing it critically. But I don’t understand the jump to saying that’s because their previous teachers have been “indoctrinating” them.
Being a critical consumer of information, especially in the digital age, is challenging. We’ve seen concrete evidence that adults on both sides of the aisle have been tricked into believing fake articles on Facebook and other platforms at surprisingly high rates. Therefore, I don’t believe what you’re seeing is the result of indoctrination. I think that if adults are so easily tricked, it’s not surprising that children are too. And we know children are online at a higher rate and younger age than ever.
With that combined with the fact that education has been significantly disrupted in the past year… why the jump to indoctrination?
Use the search terms “school board meeting” and “parents” for the last few years timespan and you’ll get myriad videos of parents and advocacy groups providing specific examples petitioning the teachers and boards to desist from indoctrinating (teaching/imparting sectarian or partisan opinion) their children Drag queen story hour for kindergarteners???
So instead of introducing children to a very different group of people (drag queens) in a setting that shows that people who are different can be very nice and caring and read them awesome stories, you propose what exactly? Because it sounds like you want to push some kind of agenda.
Love this! Great job pointing this out.
Bravo! Another spot on article! You are a voice of reason advocating for every single student, regardless of race, color or creed. Thank you!
The real dilemma here as a teacher is that the classroom is not, almost by definition, a neutral space. There are no neutral facts. Why? Because fax exist within a very human universe and we as people interpret them. That’s the challenge I face as a teacher. I must present them as impartial, as written against the backdrop of fact, as the thing that could be wielded as a weapon one way or the other. I see my job as a teacher to allow my students the freedom and the responsibility to interpret these facts. How can they do so if they cannot read? How can they do so if they cannot comprehend? How can I do so if they cannot discern for themselves? Hundred percent agree with you, Michael.
Oh my goodness, Michael! I agree, especially with the this part: “Improve their ability and intelligence through skill acquisition. Expose shallow thinking with Socratic questioning. Rely on original sources and the great thinkers and philosophers of history from all stripes, creeds, backgrounds, and viewpoints.”
I just read a book about great thinkers of the past, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Without great thinkers we wouldn’t have the Scientific Method.
Thank you for writing this article. It is our responsibility as educators to rely on the facts, not just our feelings. The social justice slogans do not belong in my classroom.
This is the first time I ever considered unsubscribing from you… I knew you were evolving 2 or 3 weeks ago when you wrote that article about the teacher who stood by and let the kids intimidate her. I knew something was up. This article is sharp and harsh yet so vague. So I really need to know. Are you in support of teaching Critical Race Theory? Do you believe that education reforms should aim to eradicate the oppressions of decades of systematic racism. Do you support Black Lives Matter? Are you pro-union? Your position on these issues never really mattered until I read this article today. I don’t expect you to answer my questions. But I have an uneasy feeling that you cannot answer with an emphatic yes to all or any of them. My answer is YES to all of them. We’re not robots Michael. No one can just leave it in the parking lot. We all have a history that we bring to the classroom. And history is being written right now. The past 2 years alone our country has experienced events like never before. Everything is changing and I believe for the better. I will be part of that change and it will be reflected in my practice. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for the classroom management. Thank you sincerely for the books, live streams, videos, and these articles. You’ve stepped across too many politically hot lines for me to stick around. Please know, I have nothing but love and respect for you and the work you do. I don’t even know how to end this comment. We’ve never met but I feel like I’m losing a friend in a way. But that’s it. Good bye.
As I sit here and reflect, I am coming up short on times where I have indoctrinated students. I teach because I care and want to help my students become civic-minded individuals who can make own informed choices. I teach critical thinking skills and advocate for students to find their voice. I DO NOT indoctrinate as people fear. If I had that power then all my students would be on grade level. However, certain truths cannot have two sides. Truths such as people are equal, people deserve respect and kindness. These things I teach by modeling them daily. If that means that I am somehow indoctrinating the students then so be it
Reading, writing, math, yes. Critical thinking — which is the ability and disposition to discern whether the available facts support a given claim — yes.
But anyone who teaches history has to decide (or have it decided for them) which facts to include and which to leave out. It is not possible to teach every facet of American history, much less world history, in a year or even over the course of K-12 schooling. Curriculum development requires someone to make choices about what is most important.
There are many verifiable historical facts about slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, racial discrimination, and racial violence that I was not taught in school because no one thought them important enough to include. Or perhaps they just didn’t know about them.
Today, many teachers, schools, and curriculum developers think these facts are important knowledge for students. But teaching about racial divisions and their effects –which are a matter of historical record — has become conflated with somehow exacerbating racial divisions, and so we see communities and states trying to ban “divisive concepts,” “critical race theory,” and so on. We see teachers who are afraid to tell their students the truth about American history for fear of losing their jobs.
Ironically, the people banning discussions claim to be protecting the intellectual freedom of students and teachers.
Teachers should not do the thinking for their students, I agree. But teachers are charged with sharing facts, telling stories, and posing problems that will be interesting and important for students to think about, inquire into, research, discuss, and debate.
Teachers and administrators can discuss and debate among themselves, and with their school and parent communities, about what needs to be included in the curriculum, but there is no neutral, impartial measure that can tell everyone what ought and ought not to be mentioned in school. This will always be a matter of someone’s judgment.
I have to concur with those who pointed out their disappointment with this article, and to be frank, the trend of articles in general lately. This web site used to be a beacon to many of us. I know that when I had a rough day (I was off on management, there was a lot on my plate, etc) I could spend my lunch break reading a few articles and feel refreshed and energized to give it my all again. I have referred to some old favorites for inspiration time and time again (your article about how to not quit teaching and your article on walking were especially helpful for my mindset). I always found that your articles were no nonsense but also so supportive and inspiring and helped me remember how great this job is and all the reasons I love it. You were kind of my teaching hero and I loved to share your site with others and gift the happy teacher habits to my student teachers over the years.
But lately the whole tone of this website and the articles has become beyond no nonsense and into aggressive, rude, and insulting to fellow teachers. There were always traces of it (you mentioned at one point something along the lines of biting your tongue but cringing at a colleague complaining about her class because you knew she was the problem). Those traces are now the core of the articles – from complying recently in a really condescending way about responses you get (if you aren’t comfortable with criticism on your writing then I would submit you don’t publish it) to this article which paints with a broad brush and lumps us all in with the negatives of the movements in our field today both from within and without. It’s gone from being a tough love colleague who was cheering us all on to another telling teachers it’s all their fault.
So disappointing. But I too will be unsubscribing. Take care.
Complaining not complaining complying
This is a tricky subject.
I agree that “indoctrination” ( political, cultural, etc.) is not a teacher’s job, but “guidance” is. For example, I feel it’s O.K. to “indoctrinate” kids with the idea that they must behave respectfully towards elders, not feel entitled to other people’s property, share one’s own possessions with others when needed etc. I also feel that even though others may view it as indoctrination, it’s more than O.K. to teach kids to be patriotic, to appreciate those who put their lives on the line so they, the students, can live in a safe and free country etc., etc.
So, back to my first thought: teachers are there to teach more than just factual information. They are there to help mold characters as well; and that’s what makes this whole issue a lot trickier than it appears at first glance.
Thank You!