Classroom or Indoctrination Camp?
Or do universities not care as long as the tuition dollars come in?
“Education should aim at making people think, while indoctrination aims at making them stop thinking.”
Bertrand Russell
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My daughter is in her first year of university and was recently asked to self-identify in a political assignment. She was given three choices.
She doesn’t have a political bone in her body and took no offence at the blatantly propagandistic identification of three political types. The assignment identified the nice group (of course, the socialists, the redistributionists, the well-intentioned communists whose ideas led to 100 million deaths in the 20th century, sorry about that), those bad folk who loved ‘capitalism’ and the third group who cared about the planet and who, on top of never driving gasoline cars, also didn’t entertain themselves by pouring oil over ducks and then washing the ducks with no-name dish soap that never really gets the oil out.
Okay, I made that last part up.
It was sophomoric: the assignment strongly inferred that anyone who had done well had stolen their prosperity from the less successful. Her instructor didn’t mention that the top 20% of earners pay 54% of all income taxes.
The assignment was dogma masquerading as pedagogy. After teaching at universities for many years, I was disappointed but not surprised. I’ve seen a lot worse.
Of course, the problem is not only in the textbooks and materials but also in the content taught, the openness or lack thereof to divergent views and whether the grading rubric pushes students to parrot instructor’s biases.
But a textbook still can directly indoctrinate.
A course in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton used a textbook, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir Puar.
Puar said that Israelis mined body parts from Palestinians, a rather new take on a very old anti-semitic trope.
“Samera Esmeir, writing of Israel’s “experimental wars” in Gaza, claims that “Gaza has become the literal testing ground for Israel’s various experiments. . . . as an occupying power, Israel transformed Gaza into such a laboratory by imposing on it different forms of confinements culminating in the siege imposed and maintained since 2006.” (2017)
The problem is that too many classes and professors have long dismissed the idea of listening seriously to alternative points of view. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, they are indoctrinating, not teaching; they tell students that there is one perspective.
We cannot brush aside this by saying we are all creatures of bias. If anyone is responsible for being self-aware enough to identify and fight against their own biases, it should be the educator. But often this is not happening.
Part of the blame lies with hiring committees that vet candidates based on political allegiance to their liberal orthodoxies. An Inside Higher Ed survey showed that only 3.9% of humanities professors self-identified as conservative. The fact that there is a self-selection bias in studying the humanities at an undergraduate level does not make this easier to stomach. It means the rot only goes deeper.
I fear that in many classrooms, we have traded in the Socratic method for the soapbox, the syllabus for the sermon, and the lecture hall for the echo chamber.
If education is the art of teaching students how to think, then indoctrination is the dark, insidious practice of teaching them what to think—and, worse yet, punishing them when they dare to think otherwise.
We are already facing the problem of credentialism replacing education, where administrators believe that learning is not their problem; their only concern is brand, revenue and degree delivery.
But indoctrinated education is worse than no education at all. It is the death of an open society; it is a mansion on the highway to tyranny.
This is not a new concern.
Orwell’s most famous critique of indoctrination comes from 1984, where he vividly describes how education, propaganda, and surveillance can mould individuals into unquestioning adherents of an authoritarian regime.
The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” speaks to how controlling knowledge and education ensures power.
In this dystopia, critical thinking is obliterated through “doublethink,” and questioning the status quo becomes a thought crime.
In his essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell warns about the degradation of language as a tool for manipulating thought. He emphasises that clear thinking is impossible without clear language and that education should prioritise critical engagement with ideas rather than teaching people to regurgitate propaganda. How much modern discussion cannot get past its tags of racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc?
Orwell’s concern about indoctrination is succinctly captured in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This satirical commentary illustrates how power structures—mirrored in systems of indoctrination—can corrupt ideals and suppress dissent.
Remember that at one time, Orwell was a committed socialist and was never considered right-wing.
I have never heard a department head or administrator express concern about courses that do not teach but rather indoctrinate.
Most administrations are slaves to the market mentality that has permeated much of Canadian secondary and post-secondary education—push them through, take their money, give them grades, rinse, repeat. Faculty tend to focus on pushing out their favourite narratives and avoiding the hard work of genuine engagement.
While Mill predates Orwell, his work On Liberty addresses similar concerns. Mill argued that education should be a crucible for ideas, not a factory for dogma. He believed that even wrong opinions had value because they forced people to refine and defend the truth.
Mill explicitly warned against the “tyranny of the majority” in education, where popular ideas stifle dissenting voices. For him, indoctrination within formal education deprives individuals of intellectual growth and risks societal stagnation.
He wrote, “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom,” emphasising that true education must encourage critical thought and dissent.
Bertrand Russell, a philosopher and Nobel laureate, was no fan of indoctrination. In his essay Free Thought and Official Propaganda, Russell highlights the danger of education being used to instil conformity rather than curiosity. He warned against teaching children to accept authority unquestioningly, writing, “The purpose of education should be to give people the ability to think critically, not to accept all the foolish things their elders tell them.”
Russell, a socialist, but a fierce critic of Marxist dogma, believed that an education system focused on indoctrination produces a society incapable of progress. “Passive acceptance of authority is the chief cause of all intellectual and moral stagnation,” he wrote, insisting that genuine education must prioritise scepticism and inquiry.
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed offers one of the most pointed critiques of indoctrination within education. He describes the “banking model” of education, where teachers deposit information into students, expecting them to absorb it passively without question.
This model, Freire argues, treats students as objects rather than active participants in their learning.
Freire believed such systems perpetuate oppression by preventing students from critically examining their realities. Instead, he advocated for a “problem-posing” approach to education, where dialogue and mutual learning empower students to challenge the status quo.
When classes indoctrinate and lose focus on genuine engagement and learning, they become mechanical, finding classroom methods that are easy and quick for both instructor and pupil. A literal example of Freire’s “banking” is when instructors test using publisher’s test banks.
I have fought for years at the University of Guelph/University of Guelph-Humber to stop the practice of instructors using publisher’s rote memorization-driven questions on exams and quizzes.
Firstly, most students have the answer keys, and these students are implicitly being taught that learning equals transcription or memorisation; so when the student leaves the final exam, the flushing noise you hear is not because the toilets are too close to the class. It is the rote memorised answers being flushed away.
When I brought it up, I was told to “shut up. ” Faculty are more guilty than administration. If you use publisher resources and have teaching assistants, you can teach a course with little effort or time commitment.
The second problem is that students learn nothing other than to be cynical about education; give them high grades, the crack cocaine of teaching, and they will be happy.
But back to the issue of indoctrination.
After teaching for 15 years, I have heard so many students tell me their electives on topics like Indigenous rights are delivered by ideologues who do not tolerate dissent and punish students who push back against instructor biases.
So, the student is silenced.
The best case is that the student separates their internal convictions from the classroom nonsense, but even with that, there is no learning, the tuition is nothing more than theft, and the student is being implicitly taught that a classroom is a place where blowhards on the other side of the podium get to vent, where surrender is the key to grades and where the entire educational experience is a Potemkin village of learning.
Nobody is quibbling about the slight bias that sneaks into every human endeavour. We all have our leanings. A nod to Keynes here, a preference for Orwell there. But what I’m talking about is something far more sinister—a full-throttle, no-holds-barred effort to reshape young minds into ideological clones.
John Dewey said that indoctrination happens when professors treat their classrooms like political rallies. In Toronto, the TDSB has outdone itself; they lied to students about what was happening on a field trip and then took students to an anti-Israel rally as part of their ‘education’. It wasn’t like a political rally; it was one.
But points for authenticity.
Like the old fishing cliche, education teaches the method—the casting of the rod, the choice of bait, and the patience of waiting. Indoctrination hands them a fish with the smug declaration that this is the only fish worth eating, and anyone who prefers salmon over trout is a fascist.
Consider the literature course where every reading list must now genuflect on the sacred trinity of race, gender, and class—because Shakespeare can’t be understood unless you interpret Macbeth as a treatise on toxic masculinity or admonish students for looking at King Lear through a cis-gendered lens.
And students are being well trained. Take, for instance, the case of Evergreen State College, where a biology professor found himself ostracised for questioning whether a “Day of Absence” (where white students and faculty were asked to leave campus) was the best path to racial reconciliation. Instead of debate, there were demands for his resignation. Ironically, these students had the perfect opportunity to practice critical thinking.
Instead, they practised mob rule.
And in my case where on November 27, I will not celebrate one year of being suspended, demeaned, threatened and defamed, and branded a criminal by staff and faculty because I spoke out against Hamas (who, for the record, I called Nazis, and it offended the Vice Provost and her anti-semitic professor pal, but my opinion has changed - Hamas are worse than Nazis, as Douglas Murray pointed out - the Nazis had to get drunk before they could shoot innocents, Hamas does it stone cold sober and calls mummy to say how proud they are).
I was shocked by so many students who seemed to have no concept of free speech.
They didn’t have deep convictions or any reason for feeling like they did, but they honestly believed that you should expect to be fired if you hurt a student's or anyone's feelings. They said this with a casual and mindless tone.
Isn’t this normal? If you have an opinion that doesn’t parrot the latest woke nostrums, isn’t termination the normal result in a healthy society? The right has biases, but the new left seems to have gone beyond the idea that their ideas are de facto truth—many believe that contrary opinions should be banned and punished.
It’s not that merely that you’re wrong and should shut up, but that you are a criminal if you even think of opposing their orthodoxies.
University and college human rights departments have become clever tools of the indoctrinator. Free speech is suspended if you have a contrary view that hurts a person's (who falls into a protected category) feelings.
In a human rights tribunal, you are automatically guilty even if an investigator (always a management pawn) deems you innocent. If the investigator tells you your soul is as pure as the virgin snow, management can still fire you - they just have to get creative.
At the University of Guelph, a Vice Provost, a person whiter than me (it depends on who used tanning cream that day), filed a human rights complaint, someone who was not in the sanctified protected classes of the human rights cult but she got away with it.
When you’re the boss, I guess you can make the rules. You might have thought only the pharaohs could speak words immediately into law, but you haven’t been to the administrative offices of a university recently.
(Note: officially, this was illegal as she wasn’t a member of a protected group, and the school did not meet the criteria for having her stand in place of a person in a protected group - in this case, a fully capable professor who was offended by his favourite terrorist group being insulted. But there is no mechanism for reversing this, which doesn’t involve tens of thousands in legal expenses and over a year of waiting. Human rights claims don’t have reverse gears. These amateurs in absurd little college or university human rights departments give away free and fun and easy defamatory vehicles to the malicious - they call it the human rights complaint)
Not only could the university pick the investigator (if she doesn’t tell them what they want to hear, they will send her report back to her for a redraft!), but someone who has strong incentives to tell them what they want to hear if she/he ever wants more $ 600/hour billings.
In my case, the person who reads the report and makes any disciplinary decision is the Claimant against me. However, the union and the university don’t see that as a conflict of interest.
People wonder why I question whether I am living in a madhouse.
And what about assignments? It doesn’t take much to turn those into indoctrination vehicles. How many assignments start with explicit assumptions, such as corporate social responsibility being good and anyone disagreeing being bad? Industrial policy is obviously for the greater good (don’t good intentions negate the need to debate such ideas? ).
Okay, dear student, look at Great Gatsby and tell us how Gatsby’s wealth is inherently patriarchal and oppressive.
The consequences of this intellectual overreach are devastating. First and foremost, it undermines the very purpose of higher education. As Allan Bloom proclaimed in The Closing of the American Mind, “Education is the movement from darkness to light.”
Indoctrination, by contrast, is the movement from darkness to a different, ideologically-approved shade of darkness.
It doesn’t liberate; it enslaves.
Consider the students who leave university unable to articulate a coherent argument without resorting to slogans. They can decry colonialism at the drop of a hat but struggle to explain what came before it or what might replace it. These graduates don’t enter the world equipped to engage with its complexities; they enter armed with dogma and anger, ready to shout down anyone who dares to disagree.
I see them rioting outside Concordia this morning, chanting death to Israel.
On a societal level, intellectual homogeneity stifles progress. Innovation thrives on diversity—not just diversity of skin colour or gender but also diversity of thought.
If every classroom becomes an ideological assembly line, we risk creating a generation of intellectual clones or non-inquisitive idiots. Many politicians love such assembly lines; I dare say politicians on both sides of the political spectrum fantasise about becoming autocrats.
As George Orwell warned in 1984, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Hence, the name of my Substack is Freedom To Offend. I was proud of myself for not using any profanities in the title.
The greatest educators have always championed the importance of critical thinking.
Socrates, the original gadfly, spent his life challenging the status quo. He didn’t spoon-feed his student's answers; he asked questions—relentlessly, annoyingly, brilliantly. His method wasn’t about indoctrinating; it was about illuminating. He pissed off the authorities so much that they put him to death.
In North America, we don’t do that yet (in Iran, they do), but don’t be fooled by censorship bills with human rights legislation that preaches guilty until bankrupt or innocent, the long, slow march to putting people to death or in jail for non-orthodox ideas is still out there and becoming larger and larger.
Enlightenment genius John Stuart Mill (will they topple his statues also? I’m sure he wasn’t gender positive and didn’t believe that ‘I identify as’ was the Aladdin-like phrase for asserting gender) strongly advocated for the marketplace of ideas.
In On Liberty, Mill argued that even wrong ideas have value because they force us to sharpen our understanding of the truth.
What would Mill make of today’s “safe spaces,” where dissenting opinions are banished in the name of emotional comfort?
So, what’s to be done? How do we wrest education from the jaws of indoctrination? For starters, we need to demand accountability. Universities must commit to intellectual diversity—not just as a buzzword but as a guiding principle.
Those peace studies degrees that indoctrinate the student right into a barista career? Student loans should be tied to job placement success. If a university starts up some fluff master’s degree that the market deems to have no value, the student loan should be reset at the true value of the degree. We might see some loans fall to double figures.
Professors should be evaluated on their ability to foster open, inclusive dialogue in the classroom.
Students, too, must play their part. They must resist the temptation to parrot their professors’ beliefs for an easy grade. They must challenge, question, and push back.
Education is fragile. It requires care, balance, and a relentless commitment to truth. Indoctrination, by contrast, is easy. It’s the intellectual equivalent of fast food—cheap, satisfying, and ultimately unhealthy.
However, the problem with McNuggets University is that it is filling, profitable, and easy.
If we allow our universities to become indoctrination camps, we risk not only the futures of our students but also the future of our society.
Remember Frederick Douglass's words as we fight this battle: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
The educator’s job is not to create disciples; the administrator’s role is not to make the gears turn. The student’s job is to question and refuse to allow themselves to turn their education into McNuggets University, no matter how lazy, fat, and disengaged the adults are in the room.
The job of all three is to create thinkers. And that means teaching them how to fish—not handing them a dead trout, praising their fishing ability and pushing them into a wilderness where they will soon be hungry.
Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.
But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.
_______________________________________________
