Indoctrination

A Thanksgiving Meditation

I miss the random, informal meetings I had as a college professor. Not the faculty meetings, department meetings, or committee meetings, but the meetings with students, between classes and lessons, during office hours or when I happened to be in the building. We were required to publish times when we were sure to be available for consultation, but I tried to be around for unpublished hours, in case a student dropped by or needed help in the recording studio or just wanted to talk. I looked forward to possible conversations with students on any topic, from academic planning to “life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas Adams put it.

I saw my job as more than round after round of preparing for classes, teaching classes, running rehearsals, teaching lessons, grading papers, and all the other expectations of professors. If I hadn’t taken time for unforeseen encounters, I believe my experience as a professor would not have been as rich as it was. I hope my students realized that I cared about their points of view. I still believe John Dewey’s aphorism, “If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” Now that I’m retired, I find there is a giant student-shaped hole in my life.

It seems to me it’s an insult to thousands of teachers like me that the profession is being accused of “indoctrination,” as if all we do is convince students to cast aside traditional morals, family values, and religious beliefs, to accept some kind of “-ism” instead. I don’t know about others, but I had my hands full teaching course topics. I also had a huge bias: to teach students to think for themselves. A good teacher must find ways to make his or her guidance obsolete.

Like good parents, we must prepare our students for the day when we are no longer needed or available. If an education is good for anything, it must be good for preparing students to leave the nest, to continue learning even when there is no formal coursework. My syllabi all mentioned the goal of “building a foundation for future learning.” I admit I tried to indoctrinate students to the concept of taking charge of their education.

Our university president once promised an audience of parents that we would not “change” their children, the implication being that we would not lead them away from their family and faith traditions. I thought at the time that if a student spent four or five years on a university degree and did not change, they would have wasted their time.

Of course, an education should change people, hopefully for the better. More knowledge of how others think, the struggles they face, what they believe, and why the world works as it does ought to provide a change in perspective. Even young children, taught in age-appropriate ways – Mr. Rodgers comes to mind – can benefit from learning that life is not all about them and their immediate circumstances. If a little knowledge can destroy one’s faith, perhaps that faith wasn’t built on a solid foundation in the first place.

I hoped to change students, just a little, by offering my perspective, sharing a little of my story, and being willing to listen to their stories as well. Sometimes I learned more than I wanted to, but that’s part of the risk I suppose. Even so, I realized I had to rely on God’s timing, so I made time for the possibility that God would bring me and one of my students together for a meaningful exchange of ideas. Classes offered opportunities as well, but these were more limited than the meetings God arranged at odd times of the day. I’m grateful for those moments.

So, I plead guilty. I tried to indoctrinate my students. One of the definitions of that word is “to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments,” in other words, “teach.” I can only hope some of what I tried to teach had some positive effect. I also hope my students were able to learn from the best of me. I certainly learned a lot from them.