The Government-Indoctrination Wars

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 07, 2021

 

An illuminating juxtaposition in the virtual pages of the New York Times: In one essay, four coauthors (including my friends David French and Kmele Foster) assert the “danger of anti-Critical Race Theory laws,” while in the article immediately below it, Scott Borchert demands a “New Deal for writers in America” in the form of new federal financial support, particularly for writers who lost income because of the Covid-19 epidemic. Each of these speaks to different aspects of the proverb: He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.

 

With apologies to French, Foster, et al., there is another relevant proverb here: the one about the horse and the barn doors. The authors concede what every clear-eyed observer already knows about our schools: “At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories.” This situation is neither new nor limited to union-dominated public-school systems in big, Democrat-run cities: If you had sat through the honors-American-history course in my conservative home town (Lubbock, Texas) in the 1990s, you’d have been under the impression that American history consists of three events: the Trail of Tears, the Triangle Shirtwaist-factory fire, and Watergate.

 

Even in conservative areas, public-school teachers tend to be well to the left of the middle for the same reason the local newspaper reporters are. Certain kinds of people are naturally attracted to certain occupations, and people arrive at their political views (and biases) the same way they arrive at their taste in music and similar preferences, which is not through the careful application of considered reason. That’s why you can on average get a pretty good read on someone’s politics if you know their home address and what kind of car they drive, or approximately what percentage of their wardrobe comes from Bass Pro Shops.

 

French, Foster, et al. bring up important concerns about the way anti-CRT laws are structured and the assumptions behind them, but that is not a case against anti-CRT laws — it is a case against badly written and clumsily conceived anti-CRT laws. As the authors themselves implicitly concede, the choice before us is not between a genuine liberal education or partisan indoctrination but between a government-run half-education dominated by ideology x and a government-run half-education dominated by ideology y. The anti-CRT laws, coarse and genuinely stupid as they often are, are an attempt to change that ideological balance, or at least to put some limit on how far to the left the public schools will tilt. And it won’t do to pretend that our schools and other institutions are not progressive-dominated ideological fiefs, a fact that accounts for at least some of the distrust in those institutions.

 

At the same time, the politicization of politician-run institutions is utterly normal. There already are ideological limitations on what can be taught in the public schools, both formal and informal norms that frequently are enforced in the same way progressive orthodoxy is enforced elsewhere in American public and institutional life: by using employment as a tool to ensure internal political conformism and cultural homogeneity. At the margins, this is accepted without much objection: No one would complain about statutory limits that forbade teaching that slavery was a good thing or questioning the historical truth of the Holocaust. But that is not where it stops.

 

Beyond ideological border-making, there generally is some positive ideological agenda in play, too, sometimes to the cheers of conservatives who believe that the public schools should cultivate patriotism, instruct students in the superiority of free enterprise, and pursue other moral goals of that nature. (Some of my fellow conservatives are positively envious of the aggressive indoctrination that Denmark, for example, imposes on immigrant students.) I believe in the superiority of free enterprise to other economic regimes as much as the next libertarian, but indoctrinating students in my views and preferences is nonetheless indoctrination. French, Foster, et al. accept this, too, for example praising German schools for indoctrinating their students in a particular point of view about their country’s 20th-century brutality. I agree with that point of view, but we should not pretend that making a point of view an academic requirement is something other than indoctrination. Propaganda for the good is still propaganda.

 

What makes this especially vexing in our context is that the typical American public-school senior hasn’t been taught enough economics to judge for himself or even to engage with the arguments about capitalism on anything but the most superficial level, just as he usually won’t know enough science to critically evaluate the arguments about hot-button issues such as climate change or enough history to put our contemporary race-related debates and convulsions into any sort of meaningful intellectual context. Most of those students won’t be any better-prepared when they finish college or, in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they are elected to the House of Representatives.

 

We already do the indoctrinating, but we don’t do the educating.

 

In the case of American education, there isn’t any good solution at hand. Even if we imagined some libertarian school-choice settlement well beyond what is politically plausible — say, a situation in which government funds K–12 education on a per-student basis without actually operating any public schools — there would still be pressure points, such as the question of which institutions are eligible to receive funds, that would become ideological battlegrounds. This is true even in the case of purely private institutions: Consider the case of Amazon’s being happily bullied into suppressing certain books expressing unpopular points of view.

 

This ought to be of some concern to Borchert as he calls for a “New Deal for writers in America.” The art produced by the actual New Deal often was crudely propagandistic (all those grotesque post-office murals) and at times was positively fascistic. The art of the New Deal amplified the ideology of the New Deal — beyond pure patronage, that was the point of the New Deal’s cultural program. Borchert argues that a federal jobs program for underemployed writers would constitute an “invaluable contribution to the nation’s understanding of itself,” words written with the confidence of a man who is sure that he is going to have his way through a program that will share his values. He ought to look elsewhere on the page, where he will see evidence that this is not necessarily to be. It mystifies me that American progressives are so keen to expand the propagandistic reach of a federal government that was, until a few months ago, headed by Donald Trump and that may in the future be presided over by some more effective and less buffoonish demagogue. The Trump administration tried, in its usual feckless way, to pursue this with the 1776 Commission and its drive for “patriotic education,” a project that was spiritually akin to the administration’s executive-order jihad against “ugly” buildings.

 

The U.S. government cannot, at the moment, operate a politically neutral tax agency. It is not going to be neutral as an educator or as a patron of the arts. Contesting this inevitably is going to be a political issue, and one of some consequence: The more the government pushes its financial tendrils into education or into the work of writers, the more opportunity for abuse and distortion there will be. There isn’t really any good way around that. And the truth is that many Americans, including many conservatives and most progressives, do not object to indoctrination per se — they are not fighting over the fact or scope of indoctrination but merely over whose doctrine prevails. Of course Republicans are pursuing this with maximum bumptiousness: They’re Republicans, and that’s how they do things. But it would be naïve to expect them to sit out the fight.

 

For those who would be happy to pay their own fiddler and to call their own tune, the political options are few and unappealing. What is certain is that the performance of our schools and Americans’ faith in them will continue to decline even as the fight for ideological control over them intensifies.