All Education Is Political
Editor's Note
The goal of the destructive Left is revolutionary: to tear down the American regime and replace it with a new one founded on a new conception of justice. In order to accomplish this, the destructive Left must convince large swathes of Americans that the old conception of justice is flawed, that the regime in which they were raised is evil and must be supplanted. For decades, the Department of Education (ED) has been one of the chief tools of this revolution, enforcing first liberal and then woke orthodoxy in schools across the country.
Understandably, many conservatives have concluded that this weapon that has done so much damage to our cause must be taken out of the fight. fight. As Pavlos Papadopoulos points out, conservatives tend to approach the debate as one between indoctrination and non-indoctrination, or between indoctrination and value-free education. But this is an error, which will ultimately come back to bite conservatives There is no value-free education. All education involves indoctrination. The question is whose indoctrination will obtain, theirs or ours. It is only by properly “indoctrinating” the next generation of citizens into the true understanding of justice that we can prevent its replacement by a false one. This is the second installment in Educating for Virtue, a series of essays on the potential for a conservative agenda at ED in a Republican administration.
The Left has spent the better part of the last century marching through our institutions, and among its greatest victories have been in education. Many conservatives have responded to Left hegemony by protesting that “politics” and “indoctrination” have no place in education. Those who have labored mightily to escape Left dominance by building non-Left alternatives or, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by directly confronting and beginning to loosen the Left stranglehold on existing institutions, have made “education, not indoctrination” their mantra.
This reaction is understandable, but insufficient and ultimately misguided. America’s answer to left-wing educational capture cannot be to simply “de-politicize” education. Education is an inherently, unavoidably political endeavor. And, while conservatives are right to criticize the Left’s ideological corruption of learning, education at its very foundation relies on indoctrination. Until we come to grips with the doctrinal basis, and political character, of education, our attempted reforms and alternatives to Left educational hegemony will be so many houses built on sand.
To appreciate the true political character of education, we should distinguish the very old phenomenon of indoctrination from the very new phenomenon of ideology.
Indoctrination is simply instruction in opinion. When an opinion is correct, it may serve as a solid foundation for higher forms of education.
Noah Webster defined doctrine as “in a general sense, whatever is taught; hence, a principle or position in any science; whatever is laid down as true by an instructor or master.” To call something a doctrine is not yet to comment on its epistemic status: “a doctrine may be true or false; it may be a mere tenet or opinion.” Indoctrination, far from having today’s pejorative sense, simply means “instructions in the rudiments and principles of any science; information.” Every attempt at upbringing and teaching begins with indoctrination into certain opinions. Such opinions are always initially held by the student as opinions.
Plato distinguished correct opinion (having the right answer without knowing why or how or even whether it is correct, and thus not really knowing the truth at all) from incorrect opinion (having the wrong answer without knowing it’s wrong). The purpose of a higher education is to refine, and ascend from, mere opinion to genuine knowledge. This task is made easier when the original opinions, acquired at an earlier stage of education, are correct. But an important mark of any genuine education is that it will interrogate opinions, compare preconceived notions and prejudices to new facts, and revise what one previously believed to be true. Even when the truth accords with the originally held opinions, a great deal of refinement will have occurred along the way, as the original opinions are seen in a new light.
Education, then, is not merely indoctrination; but neither are they opposed. Genuine education builds upon sound doctrine. It is a conceit of late-modern liberalism that we can do without our original formation in habits and opinions and still achieve virtue and wisdom. In education, this results in the denigration of memorizing poems and prayers, eloquent speeches and Founding documents; the neglect of specific pieces of knowledge like grammatical rules, logical forms, mathematical axioms, geographic facts, historical names and dates; the exaltation of “critical thinking skills” rather than knowledge and love of things worth knowing and loving; and the aspiration to teach students “how to think, not what to think.” The “how” is not possible without some “what,” at least as a starting-point.
Indoctrination is as old as Scripture and the classics. Ideology, by contrast, is a distinctly modern and totalizing phenomenon. Hannah Arendt located the essence of totalitarian government in ideology and terror: ideology, an –ism “which to the satisfaction of its adherent can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise”; and terror, the dehumanizing violence inflicted by a regime that tries to dissolve its own people and reconstitute them to realize its ideology. The totalitarian ideologies Arendt investigated were Bolshevism, according to which all history is the history of class struggle, and Nazism, according to which all history is the history of racial struggle. Each ideology selected one aspect of humanity, made it the sole premise of its system, and insisted that every event could and must be explained within that system. Blinkered by their pseudo-scientific account of everything, ideologists are necessarily impatient with the nuances of real persons and the histories of actual nations, and oblivious to “the miracle of being” that transcends the merely political, historical, or human.
Ideology can have no place in education. When it does, reason is made a slave to the regime, rather than a faculty for discerning and communicating truth. Experience, rather than furnishing us with new occasions for thought and reflection, is forced into one of the ideology’s reductive scripts.
In the last few years, the Left’s cultural revolutionaries have burst into the public square, revealing the extent of their power and the poisonous fruits of their ideologies. The 1619 Project attempts to rewrite American history as nothing more than the history of racial struggle and to force every American into ready-made categories of oppressor and oppressed. Gender theory has stubbornly ignored vital data — both ordinary human experience and mounting scientific evidence — while its ideologists continue their quest to brainwash, mutilate, and sterilize an entire generation of children.
Race and gender ideology inevitably corrupt education. In so doing, they reveal the distinction between indoctrination, which is necessary for education, and ideology, which is its greatest enemy. Race and gender ideology strain to suppress all naïve experiences and ordinary opinions, and expunge every exception to their ideological categories (disadvantaged whites and privileged blacks; tomboys and detransitioners). By contrast, an education that refuses to identify racial oppression as the one true principle of American history, or to condemn cisheteronormativity as the evil essence of the American family, is able to build confidently upon correct opinions taught to the young about our national history and our natural desires, free from the constant anxiety to force facts into an ideological straitjacket.
Genuine education, then, rests upon indoctrination while rejecting ideology. Moreover, education is inherently and unavoidably political, in the highest sense of the term.
Conservatives, when they acknowledge that education has some connection to politics, often rush to clarify: “We don’t mean partisan politics!” This is true as far as it goes, but hardly adequate. Aristotle recognized that humans are naturally political because we possess reason. Reason reveals not only the true and the false, but also “the advantageous and the harmful, and thus also the just and the unjust.” Humans have “a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.”
Because our reason can, and does, transcend political concerns, we are not wholly or simply political animals (this is the error of totalitarianism and of every ideology). But our political nature is grounded in our reason: each community recognizes, and in some sense is constituted by, a vision of what is morally and materially desirable—topics of rational perception, debate, and deliberation. Every community embodies a particular hierarchy of perceived goods: a warrior aristocracy has a different order of goods, a different code of justice, and a different teaching on the good life, than a commercial republic. As America has entered an age of regime-level politics, this has become more and more true of our political parties. Their contrasting proposals for what is good for the country (or humanity) correlate to diverging notions of justice, of what our regime is or ought to be, and ultimately how human happiness is to be found.
As Aristotle observed, “nobody would dispute that the education of the young requires the special attention of the lawgiver. Indeed the neglect of this in states is injurious to their constitutions; for education ought to be adapted to the particular form of constitution.” A sensible American education system would work with parents and religious communities to equip students to become members of flourishing families, competent workers, creative innovators, excellent scholars, and responsible inheritors of the American and Western traditions. Put otherwise, education ought to cultivate free citizens of a constitutional republic grounded in natural reality. This is a political goal in the highest sense of the term: education with a view to a particular form of government, which correlates to a particular form of life and the good life for its citizens.
By contrast, an education system that renders the next generation lonely and sterile, incompetent and economically dependent, ideologically addled, addicted to unreality, and variously contemptuous toward and ignorant of their national and civilizational inheritance, and which does so intentionally as part of its ideological program, will produce not citizens of a republic, but rather subjects of an ever-more-despotic administrative state. This, too, is a political goal, albeit an undesirable one.
The unavoidably moral and political nature of education is obvious in areas such as history and literature, which directly shape our esteem or contempt of heroes and villains; and here, “piety and gratitude ought to be our initial orientation to the principles and history of our own country.” But maintaining high standards at all, including in STEM fields, is also a political act that contributes to the happiness of students and the greatness (cultural, economic, technological, and military) of the nation. Schools that impartially maintain high standards, and accept (despite the shrill protests of the Left) the disparate academic outcomes that will inevitably result, will be forced to distinguish the respects in which we are and are not equal by nature, and to retrieve their role in what Madison called “the first object of government,” namely, “the protection of different and unequal faculties.”
Nearly a century ago, T.S. Eliot described a strange creature that thought it could cut the connection between education and politics. He called this creature a “liberal,” and noted it was already dominant in his age: “The liberal attitude towards education is that with which we are the most familiar. It is apt to maintain the apparently unobjectionable view that education is not a mere acquisition of facts, but a training of the mind as an instrument, to deal with any class of facts, to reason, and to apply the training obtained in one department in dealing with new ones.” The liberal “how to think, not what to think” approach to education betrayed a deeper insecurity or even ignorance, which Eliot contrasted with a radical (that is, ideologically Communist) approach on the one hand and an orthodox (that is, correctly opinioned) approach on the other.
While liberalism did not know what it wanted of education, radicalism does know; and it wants the wrong thing. Radicalism is, however, to be applauded for wanting something. It is to be applauded for wanting to select and eliminate, even if it wants to select and to eliminate the wrong things. If you have a definite ideal for society, then you are right to cultivate what is useful for the development and maintenance of that society, and discourage what is useless and distracting. And we have been too long without an ideal.
Eliot knew that the mirage of a politically neutral education is just that: a mirage. Americans working for a counter-revolution against Left educational hegemony must not settle for providing students a putatively neutral framework for perpetual debate on moral and political questions. The framework is never neutral, and eventually every debate must end. Such initiatives—including many schools of “civic education,” programs boosting “civil discourse,” and movements to promote “intellectual diversity”—seem to forget that every civitas is a particular community with particular interests, organized around particular beliefs about justice.
Following Eliot, we ought to confidently “select and eliminate” the Left ideologies and liberal delusions that corrupt and hamper genuine education in our schools. Having clarified for ourselves the kind of America we wish to preserve or restore, we should “cultivate what is useful for the development and maintenance of that society, and discourage what is useless and distracting.” To do any less would be to abandon our duties as educators and citizens.