Public Schools – Indoctrination or Education

For many years, I have written on the decline in US education. Not alone, the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), last year, reported a shocking lack of recovery in scores for young Americans since COVID shutdowns. Less talked about the rise of indoctrination.

School time is a tradeoff. Using time to push ideological ideas produces an “opportunity cost,” a loss of that time to educate. From California to Maine, we are failing our children. Democrat states are normalizing ideological indoctrination, emotionalism, abnormal behaviors, under-performance, no consequences for classroom disruption, no deterrence, and failure as an acceptable outcome.

Unlike much of the world – and unlike former US performance – this trend is fundamentally debilitating for students who miss their one chance to learn life skills in a school setting, getting on track for success. It robs them of lifetime success and starts an intergenerational cycle of failure.

Put differently, a child who cannot understand the world around them, cannot read, and do math will fail in life. The data is overwhelming. They will fail in relationships, securing a job, owning a home, raising a family, and developing fully. They will revert to crime, drugs, depression, and desperation.

In effect, the choices they have are amputated. When those choices are replaced by false, ideological, collectivist, atheist, and activist ideas; when simplification is pushed over critical thinking; when pressure to conform via mechanized non-thought is taught, they invariably fail.

Alexander Sozelitzen – a brilliant “critical thinker” and writer – described it in the Soviet Union. He was first indoctrinated, then realized what independent thought was, began questioning and debating ideas, sought truth through critical thinking, and then shed indoctrination for education.

As he described the Soviet process, now in US public education, he had not been taught how to reason, read widely, do math, write, had lost biology, chemistry, physics, established history, critical thought, and moral character – right from wrong. They were displaced by indoctrination.

That process began early and, as other writers confirm, involves “implanting” these ideas, then pushing “simplification” (not critical thinking), and “mechanization” of the process. From the former Soviet Union to China, this is used to dumb down, enforce conformity, and tame the youth.

Parallel ideas, beyond communist ideology, include reduced expectations for individual accomplishment, under-educating to control, punishing independent thought, denying morality, pushing relativism and activism (hostility toward individuality), favoring group, tribe, or racial division, denying fundamental rights or natural law, expanding the idea to absurdity (thus making rights meaningless), taking rights from parents, and criminalizing traditional individual rights.

The process is insidious and intentional, but can also break into the open and become obvious. As underperformance, irrational and emotional behaviors replace reason and independent thought; as individual rights are subordinated to groupthink, group rights, and group division – the concepts on which communism thrives – people either lose control of their lives, or wake up and retake control.

Solzhenitsyn argued that individuals – all of us, if we love freedom, morality, and what is good for families and a free society – must wake up and think for ourselves. This is also needed now.

Coming back to schools, this means our success as individuals, families, and a self-governing society depends – as Heritage contends – on rediscovering real and “liberal education,” which used to mean morally grounded, disciplined, reasoned, and rigorous education, and how to think.

Only by regaining this understanding that curiosity, questioning, independent thought, and learning are good, that we do it individually and within families to seek the truth, do we survive as free people. Only by aspiring to think harder, work together to find the truth, do we mature into the people we need to be for liberty. Only by looking hard do we understand math, science, history, and God.

That is not where Democrat-run public schools are going. They are going in the opposite direction, denying facts, indulging fictions, dumbing down, and amputating opportunities for young people to think independently, objectively, not rewarding curiosity and hard work but discouraging it.

Heritage recently wrote: “While it is crucial for schools to refrain from pushing propaganda on children, American parents, citizens, and lawmakers concerned about indoctrination must also seek out an education for children that sharpens their intellects through engagement with ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ thus preparing them to think independently, pursue truth honestly, and exercise citizenship responsibly.”

I would like to add something to that, but cannot. That last paragraph says it all. We either understand we are facing ruination by indoctrination, or we save our kids by education. There is no middle way. We either submit to mass indoctrination, or we seek truth, reclaim public education.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!