Education, Ideology, and Indoctrination: A Selection from Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society (2012)

“In many colleges and universities, whole academic departments are devoted to particular prepackaged conclusions—whether on race, the environment or other subjects, under such names as black, women’s or environmental ‘studies.’ Few, if any, of these ‘studies’ include conflicting visions and conflicting evidence, as educational rather than ideological criteria might require.

Critics of ideological indoctrination in schools and colleges often attack the particular ideological conclusions, but that is beside the point educationally. Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that all the conclusions reached by all the various ‘studies’ are both logically and factually valid, that still does not get to the heart of the educational issue. Even if students were to leave these ‘studies’ with 100 percent correct conclusions about issues A, B and C, that would in no way equip them intellectually with the tools needed to confront very different issues X, Y and Z that are likely to arise over the course of their future years. For that they would need knowledge and experience in how to analyze and weigh conflicting viewpoints. As John Stuart Mill said:

‘He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.’ . . .

In the early twentieth century especially, parents were not sending their children to school to become guinea pigs in someone else’s social experiments to use education as a means of subverting existing values in order to create a new society based on new values, those of a self-anointed elite, more or less behind the backs of parents, voters and taxpayers.”—Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (2012)