About That Word “Indoctrination”
I seriously hate getting up in the morning. Hate it. I have about 20 alarms set on my phone and my iPad, in case I end up slamming a few too many of them off, going back to sleep, and missing work. I’m not gonna lie. When I first got hired to teach elementary, I had one question that stood above all others. It wasn’t about curriculum. It wasn’t about culture. It wasn’t about the lack of available closet space. I simply asked my team when the school day started, what time we had to be on campus. I was terrified that I would oversleep and lose my job. But somehow, for the past three years, I’ve woken up every morning, sometimes earlier than I expect to, but mostly just in time to get a shower and run out the door. And that, my friends, is literally the ONLY time I’ve ever used any version of this frightening word “woke” that seems to have become a lightning rod of ongoing nonsense.
Right now, the narrative spinning in Florida is that teachers are indoctrinating their students, that most of us are a danger to children and families, that none of us are capable of managing our classrooms anymore without the great big hand of God himself, via legislation, to control our tongues and our spaces. None of this is real, of course. But hey, they used to say Hillary Clinton was running a basement of slave kids and some guy drove miles to save these imaginary victims from yet another non-existent problem. He brought his arsenal, of course, before landing in the back of a cop car. So what’s the worst that could happen from telling a few million parents that teachers are the next fictional problem? Nothing, right?
Let me get one thing out of the way first. I don’t doubt that a few spoiled apples have made there way to the head of a few bad classrooms. Been in a few rooms over the years where I wondered how and why that person ever became a teacher. But to be fair, I’ve never heard of a place, a job, or an experience where literally everyone is awesome. Melissa and I went to see a comedian the other night and somehow landed in front of the one couple that had to give a commentary on every joke, curse at every gap of silence, or laugh at every unfinished punchline. Bad people are out there, I tell ya. But it’s a very peculiar and arrogant thing to pretend that an entire profession is a threat, especially when the people within that profession have largely spent their entire careers working to diminish threats and heal divides, to help children work together and learn.
Anyhow, I wanted to talk for a minute about that word “indoctrination,” since that’s the one people keep throwing around, as if they really knew what it meant. I suppose that’s kinda how words work these days. I mean, last September, parents threatened school board members after accusing them of being tyrannical oppressors. Last I checked, that’s called a gross exaggeration. Hyperbole. Paranoia. But let’s pretend it matters. Let’s pretend for a second that people actually care about the words they use.
Indoctrination is a church word, my friends. I learned it growing up. Never heard it anywhere else, never in all my life by anyone in any field of any profession for more than forty years, not until the past year when it came up in some new whipped-up political hysteria. Back in church, it was always used by leaders who feared their congregation would fall to the differing ideas, views, or biblical conclusions of another pastor down the street. The phrase they used to give us, if we were members of their group, was that we must “guard against” the threat of indoctrination, that we must “never allow” ourselves to become indoctrinated by those other false doctrines. But here’s the thing, even back then, even in the church, even the way THEY tried to use it, that’s not really what indoctrination means. It’s a church word, sure, used for infighting among Christians with different positions, but it means something far more simple, something so utterly conventional and easy that it’s a wonder anyone ever decided it was worth using to stoke fear.
Indoctrination goes back to the era of King James (yes, exactly, the King James of the King James Bible) and it simply meant to “teach” or “inspire.” Imagine that. Teachers teaching. Or teachers inspiring. Golly gee. Who would have thought we would ever dare.
My friends, when I step into a classroom, my job is not to pass along information prescribed by the state, then go take a nap. That’s not what teaching is. I don’t memorize facts and spit them at my kids. I don’t learn how to multiply, make my kids memorize the tables, then twiddle my thumbs while they figure out how to manage themselves for the next six hours. And I certainly don’t read a bunch of word problems out of a book and hope they get the secret message I meant for them to find. My job is to engage and build their confidence, to ensure they can think critically on their own, about anything and everything. If they get into a conflict, for example, I also don’t sit back and wait for them to bleed it out. I sit down with them and help them process, consider the why, consider the now, consider the next step forward.
So let’s cut through the crap.
You know where I got trained to do all this? You know who set up and approved all the courses I took to become a teacher, officially? You know where I’ve spent my entire career teaching and serving kids? The State of Florida. The Florida Department of Education. This is the very government that now deems me and my colleagues a threat to children. I met every qualification they demanded, took every course they arranged, and fulfilled every obligation of my profession, then entered schools and asked principals and teachers to consider hiring me so I could do precisely what I had been taught to do by the state in which we both wished to continue our act of public service to children and their families.
In other words, I’ve been vetted. I’ve earned the trust of my state. And over time, I’ve earned the ongoing trust of every parent of every child who walks in my classroom. So why would I or any of my colleagues ever welcome a direct slap in the face by the same government that groomed us to do the very things we’ve been doing, as if we are now, against our own training, doing something nefarious and unjust? There’s no question that I demand a lot from my students. I set incredibly high expectations and I don’t ever let up or give up. But to this day, I’ve never been scolded for how I teach or what I teach. You know why? Because I’ve never taught anything in any way that was beyond the duty and the call of my profession.
And here’s the deal. If you’re a parent or a grown adult who thinks I’m the enemy, my classroom door is wide open. Come on in for a day or two and then you tell me where we stand. If I am indeed the enemy you tell people I am, I’ll walk away from the profession and go write more books (probably about you, though, since I’ll have a lot of angry time on my hands). But if I’m doing a pretty decent job taking care of your kids and other people’s kids, then please, please, please stop joining these ridiculous fights against my profession.
Right now there’s a war overseas. A whole heck of a lot of people dying for no reason. There are floods, forest fires, and earthquakes. There are bridges, roads, and buildings that need repair. There are people without homes, without jobs, without health care. There are neighbors and friends who need a hug. Go work on that.
In the meantime, I’ll keep setting those twenty plus alarms, every night for every morning I plan to keep serving in a state that keeps punching me in the gut.
