Education is not as important as you think.
A rambling meditation on whether or not it's possible to have education without indoctrination. Short answer: I don't think it is.
When I was 14 years old, and really wanted to be a writer. One of the stories I wrote was about a Nazi who had sex with a black woman and how the experience corrected his ways, and he was no longer a Nazi. Thankfully, a family friend was kind enough to politely point out to me that I was simplifying racism and told me not to share the story with anyone else. While well-intentioned in a juvenile-white-kid kind of way, the turning of a black woman into mere symbolism and her fictional penetration by a Nazi for my own creative purposes was cruel and ignorant. It’s further telling and weird that as a young Jewish boy, I would have chosen a black woman instead of a Jew. I’m troubled by that.
My Nazi redemption story was written around the same time my “Christian-inspired” private school in Florida had assigned its students to write a letter to then-President George W. Bush thanking him for protecting us from the terrorists. At 12 years old, I thanked him profusely in a jumble of admiration, anger, contradiction, and oversharing. You can read that letter here if you dare.
I was clearly being spoon-fed some problematic storylines and didn’t really know what to do with them. In history class, a Jewish classmate said in passing that his ancestors were German and my history teacher announced to the class that it’s not possible to be Jewish and also German. He felt it necessary to add to his statement that the Jews killed Jesus. I wish someone had told me that I could think critically of the many stupid things my adult teachers and “role models” thought about the world.
These memories came welling up in me recently while feeding my son yogurt one morning. I was watching a Tucker Carlson video featured on a Fox News article titled “Diverse mothers across US are speaking out against critical race theory, fighting 'like hell' for children.”
Of course, the featured interview was not with any of the “diverse” women pictured above but with a white woman named Nicole. Nicole was appalled that on Thanksgiving, her children were asked by teachers, “What could have American colonists done to treat the Natives better?” She felt this question was indoctrinating them to hate their country and their “American heritage.” When she stated this opinion at a school council meeting, a council member called her racist and this made Nicole feel oppressed—🎻.
Nicole is now suing to have the council member removed. Lost on Nicole was the fact that many people in her children’s class probably had different heritages or different relationships to the American origin story. A classmate from the Lokata tribe, for instance, perhaps could have answered the question and in doing so help everyone gain some nuanced understanding of our country’s history. Better yet, instead of making a Native person do the emotional labor of explaining to their classmates their own historical trauma, information about the Native American genocide perpetrated by U.S. founding colonies could just be part of the curriculum—even if it makes Nicole uncomfortable.
The truth is, Nicole’s discomfort and feeling that the question is anti-American comes from the fact that she herself, like most of you reading this, were spoonfed a very troublesome and objectively false version of history.
Everyone in my generation and many generations before me was subjected to this nice-seeming cartoon known as Schoolhouse Rock. Of course, it should come as no surprise that this cutesy cartoon’s main goal is to hand young children irrevocably evil, nationalist, Christian, pedophilic, revisionist, white supremacist ideology. For instance, the Schoolhouse Rock song “Elbow Room” is a euphemism for elbowing out the people who were in the land already. Of Lewis & Clark, they sing:
They hired Sacagawea to be their guide
She led them all across the countrysideThere were plenty of fights
To win land rights
But the West was meant to be;
It was our Manifest Destiny!
The trappers, traders, and the peddlers
The politicians, and the settlers
They got there by any way they could.
This passes as a history lesson in our great country. This is the sort of American history that Tucker Carlson and Ms. Nicole can get behind.
Sacagawea, of course, was not hired. She was captured from her Lemhi Shoshone tribe at 11 years old and sold to a 36-year-old Frenchman named Toussaint Charbonneau. Charbonneau then went on to be part of the Lewis & Clark expeditions to “pioneer” the West and, of course, brought his wife/slave Sacagawea with him.
In this way—and literally a million other ways—idealogy makes its way into our psyche and our world views as children and as adults. If you have multiple generations being spoonfed this nationalist and revisionist claptrap, it’s no surprise the country seems so politically divided right now. Half of them are attached to a Schoolhouse Rock version of history, and the other half has finally decided that letting our history be written by the victors is not exactly the pathway to a just future.
While I have and will continue to critique the tactics of modern progressives, the pitfalls of wokeness and cancel culture will always be more bearable than the conservative perpetuation of a centuries-old propaganda campaign to idealize US democracy and its history. Those of my parent’s generation, and many in mine, who cling to the Schoolhouse Rock history, have no interest in holding themselves accountable for the trash stories they believe and perpetuate. (I’m talking to you “black-on-black crime.”)
Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones and Words Can Also Hurt You and Everyone Around you.
In an effort to cleanse my soul of the degenerate sounds of Tucker Carlson’s voice that I regretfully let into my home and my child’s ears on an otherwise calm and lovely Saturday morning, I decided to rearrange my bookshelf a bit. It had become overrun and some old, forgotten books were begging to be rehomed.
The first to go was A Yellow Raft in Blue Water:
When I was 16 years old, I escaped the conservative enclave of a private Christian school in Florida when I moved to the liberal enclave of a public school in Santa Barbara, California. Now, instead of being “forced” to write letters to criminal war-mongering presidents, I was “forced” to read stories about Native American reservations. But I can now see it was the same colonialist patriarchal shit wearing woke clothes.
I actually had fond memories of this book. The story takes place on a Lakota Indian Reservation and has three parts from a daughter, mother, and grandmother’s point of view: Rayona, Christine, Ida. It shows how each subsequent generation struggled to keep their Native culture alive in the face of the American culture’s lure to the younger generations.
At one point, Rayona, the youngest, is molested by an older white man who is on the reservation as a Christian missionary. I remember this book being one of the first times I really thought about what life was like for people on reservations. To some degree, it opened my eyes to the pressures other people live under that I was/am privileged enough to know nothing about. While the word privileged wasn’t talked about in class, to my knowledge, I was still certainly aware my life was freer and less troubled than Rayona’s.
In 2021, though, over a decade later, my high-school brain still remembered this book fondly—the memory had not been updated by current events. I was recommending to Marley that she maybe read it lest I donate it to Goodwill, but I cranked my head now at the idea that a presumably white man would write a book from three native women’s point of view. Cringe. I could have sworn it was written by a woman.
I was further confused that it would also win National Book awards and be reviewed glowingly in the Washington Post and Newsday; these sorts of books don’t slip through the cracks anymore, do they? I felt that particular dread that happens when you realize you were an unconscious pawn in someone else’s game. The same feeling I got when I re-read my assigned thank you letter to George W. Bush.
She immediately brought up Tortilla Curtain a critically renowned book that was required reading in her class. Written by a white man named Thomas John Boyle from upstate New York, the book is, in Marley’s words “Mexican trauma porn.” It documents the harrowing experiences of two Mexican immigrants trying to enter the US and facing racism and oppression at every turn.
Of course, it’s fictional: these stories, these people, and these events—much like my juvenile Nazi redemption story— were complete fabrications in the colonized minds of white or white-identifying men who were was trying to understand racism in, depressingly, the only way they knew how: by perpetuating the problem.
These books won the awards and became required reading instead of, I don’t know, books by people who actually went through these experiences.
This was just more victors writing the history. In the case of Tortilla Curtain, it exposes the colonialist tactic of giving a white man the microphone to tell a harrowing story about their horrible treatment of minorities while patting their own backs for telling the story at all. In the case of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Michael Dorris, it’s more nuanced.
Michael Dorris’ was, in fact, 1/4th Native American. So he gets some points here, which I will later rescind. One can imagine from the context of his life, but also his biography and life path, that Dorris had some identity issues and struggled to find his place in America’s social strata as a Native American who was white-passing.
It turns out that Dorris adopted three Lakota children to father on his own, with no wife. To me, this was a red flag that this man was working through some serious stuff and was using these children to do it. I wasn’t wrong.
The first child he adopted turned out to have fetal alcohol syndrome and was the subject of his first recognized book—The Broken Cord. The book’s description states that Dorris “admits his rage at his own impotence to make his son's life fuller and eloquently describes moments of pride, hope and—always—love.”
I’m sure having a father full of “rage at his own impotence” was a lovely way for a developmentally challenged, adopted boy to be raised by a single father. After the success of his first book, Dorris adopted two more Native American children and then married famous Native American author Louise Erdrich.
In 1997, Dorris committed suicide when one of his sons publicly announced that he had been molested by Dorris throughout his childhood. After his death, Dorris’ other adopted daughter confirmed that she too was molested by him and that Erdrich did nothing to stop the abuse.
Regardless of the accolades, I’d eulogize Dorris as “knowingly colonizing his own people to untie his own psychological and identity issues. In the process, he caused more trauma while achieving great acclaim and success in the eyes of the colonizer, who loved him as their own because he was an ‘other’ but he was also an abuser like them. He addressed his guilt and personal demons in his books by writing about a white man molesting helpless Native girls when in fact this character represented the 3/4ths of him that was white and somehow by osmosis, helped him admit to the world that he was a criminal abuser.”
I’m not feigning surprise that an abusive man was given a pass by everyone, including his wife; we’re quite familiar with this story now. What is shocking to me is how these revelations did little to tarnish his reputation. A decade after his suicide, his book was still assigned in my public school. It was still in print with its rave reviews featured on the cover (and still is). In my class, a decade later, it was still used to springboard conversations about the treatment of indigenous people, and this was all done without any self-awareness that its inclusion and platform in my classroom was itself continued mistreatment of indigenous people.
Education is Indoctrination
As Marshall McLuhan famously states, “the medium is the message.” This means we should focus just as closely on how information is being delivered to us as we do on what the information is. In the case of education, the medium is usually an adult standing in front of a room of children telling them what to think about everything from government to history to science to art. What matters here is not what the teacher is saying, but that they are saying anything at all while the kids take it all in.
I remember a friend who had just graduated from Wharton Business school bragging to me that he finished his degree and was heading to work at an investment bank and did it all without reading a single book cover to cover in all of college. It occurred to me that business schools are just capitalist indoctrination hubs. While they could be places that foster a deeper understanding of value, capital, the economy, and its role, instead they just churn out bottom-liners who don’t see the connection between their Excel sheet and the world at large. The idea that Marxism might be discussed in business school is simply not compatible with the role of business school, even though Karl Marx was obsessed with capitalism and at the very least would be a great jumping-off point to discuss what exactly capitalism is. As a side note, when this guy made his first big chunk of cash I visited his apartment to see that he had purchased a small Rauschenburg, presumably worth tens of thousands of dollars. He told he hadn’t even looked at it closely yet. I approached it to see it was a Wall Street Journal page with blood-splattered red paint across it.
I think what really bothers me about how education is being discussed by Tucker Carlson and Ms. Nicole is not that they want to keep ideologies they view as harmful in check in the school system—that’s fine with me and well within their rights—but that they think imposing their own America-fellating ideology is the answer.
The truth is, there is very little education without indoctrination. Whether Ibram X. Kendi rewrites all US curriculum or Tucker Carlson does, we will be indoctrinating our children. And while I’d subject my son to Kendi Kurriculum over Carlson Curriculum any day, it’s not really a sustainable solution.
We live in an either/or us/them climate. Even as I write this, I’m struggling to see who the victor/loser in history is. If we let the “losers” write the history, then do they become the victors? If you teach Marxism in business school is it suddenly Marxist indoctrination? Is it that easy? I don’t know.
I Don’t Know, Therefore I Know.
If I were going to write a Raab Rurriculum, there would be no teachers. Teachers would be rebranded facilitators. (There are many pedagogies experimenting with this already.) And the curriculum itself would be a series of explorations without any endpoint except when the facilitator felt it was time to switch gears. Lessons would rather be paths that the class moves down together, and depending on the personalities and people in the classes, one class might take a totally different route than another. That’s nuance.
In a Raab Rurriculum, there would be a constant effort to get children to improve their metacognitive skills. That is, help them think about the ways in which they are thinking. And by extension, help them think about how the people teaching them and creating content are thinking. This is how you train someone to be unperturbed by propaganda.
There would be no silo’d “subjects” like math and science and art and history because they all intersect and interrelate and so can be covered simultaneously as needed. These boundaries are false.
For instance, kids and adults alike need to look upon repeated phrasing with identical language (like “black on black crime” or “woke” or “Palestinian settlements”) with suspicion. These little vocabulary clues are usually the result of an orchestrated effort to affect how the population thinks about something. As linguist Roland Barthes said of cultures and vocabulary: “You don’t speak a language, a language speaks you.” In that way, we can zoom out and see that every word choice is meaningful, and you can all explore why.
This simple form of media analysis is a gateway drug to full-fledged media analysis. All we do (you’re doing it right now), and all our kids do (they are probably doing it right now), is received media, but we so rarely discuss that media directly, how it affects us, regardless of who is behind it. This massive cultural oversight is the reason that most of our country was not able to tell they were being manipulated by actual fake news—seemingly real stories with no basis in reality distributed for the sole reason of creating confusion.
The goal of Raab Rurriculum would be to help us approach some namaste vibes by helping us all stop identifying with our jobs, our opinions, our sports teams, our political parties, our news sources, our tastes, and yes, even many of our opinions we mistake for morals. In my view, this should be the goal of all spiritualism, all meditation, and all education: to Zoom out out out out out out out. The clothes I wear, the instruments I play, the chords I play on that instrument, the shows I watch: a million other people are playing those chords and watching that show and wearing that shirt. So what does that leave us with? What is there to do?
We are all exactly the same and we are all completely different: the truth lay in the constant oscillation between these two facts.
It’s not whether you are right and the person you are talking to is wrong, it’s about whether the dynamic between you two, the way in which you are relating to one another, is right or wrong. This is another way of saying, “the medium is the message.”
I believe it is in identifying with our beliefs that real social and interpersonal trouble begins. The racist man was once taught to be racist, and he identifies with those stories because his teachers and his parents, and his preachers indoctrinated him in subtle and overt ways in the same way they themselves were indoctrinated. Because he identifies so closely with those beliefs, any information which might shatter those beliefs are taken as direct affronts to his identity: an existential threat. The Social Justice warrior who so closely identifies with their belief that they can stop all harm in the world suddenly doesn’t find jokes funny anymore because everything is offensive.
Radical Acceptance would help both of these people come to terms with the tension they feel with the external world.
Identifying with our beliefs, and identifying other people with their beliefs, makes for an increasingly rigid world. I feel it tightening around me even as I write this. But I won’t collude with that way of thinking anymore. I feel as if I’m a bystander in that part in the cartoon where two characters are fighting in a tornado of lines, and I’m just waiting for them to land back on their asses with tweety birds circling their heads.
In Conclusion
If for some reason A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is still determined to be a great book to assign in schools, I’m fine with it, I guess, but in the Raab Rurriculum it’s not the content of the book that will be the only thing up for discussion, but why the schoolboard chose it in the first place, and why Michael Dorris is a problematic hypocrite, and how abusers use the bully pulpit to discredit their victims, and any other inroads that a given class would like their facilitator to travel down and explore with them. And these inroads will get murky and muddy, and the whole class will sometimes have to back out of because they are stuck in the weeds or have started a forest fire, but these inroads are not just handed out as small tokens to give the students the feeling of control over their education.
These winding scary roads are the education.
As always, a picture of my son (and my hot wife), and my breakfast:
