Re: Townhall.com – 2/10/2009 – “De-Programming Students” – Thomas Sowell

School indoctrination is nothing new.

I grew up during the era where we were taught that almost any ally of our country was “good” and a “friend” and any supporter of Soviet Communism was “bad” and an “enemy”. One day in class, just after hearing on the radio the night before that Juan Peron had just arrested virtually all of Argentina’s opposition newspaper editors for criticizing his rule, my teacher yet once again repeated that dumb “good/friend” statement. I raised my hand and asked her whether it was good to arrest journalists who disagreed with the government, and whether Peron was a great friend of Argentina’s free press. I earned no points with my teacher that day.

By the time children get to school (certainly by the time they learn to read) they should have been taught by their parents that not everything they read or are told in school is necessarily 100% true and belong to one of three “truth classes”: some things are true (or false) and rational dispute about these things should end once all the facts are known; some things are a matter of opinion for which debate can be endless but truth and falsity are not relevant attributes; and for some things it really doesn’t matter if they are true (or false) because if you do not behave as if they are true (or false) you will be punished. And children should have learned which kinds of things belong in which truth class. No student should be so unprepared for education that the student should not be able to question and even challenge professorial opinions (within the structure of the class) with questions and on exams. I and all my friends did.

Surprisingly, I found my high school education slightly on the “conservative” side and my college education miraculously unbiased even though I took several courses in government and philosophy, areas where you would expect professorial bias --- presumably because my university stressed intellectual process over opinion. My graduate degrees were in the hard sciences, where issues of political (and even scientific) bias are hardly relevant.  When I left industry for academia as a professor, I found my academic colleagues slightly on the liberal side. I guess that means in my experience, either education has little net bias or education has moved from slightly conservative to slightly liberal, either in time or as I progressed from elementary to graduate school. At any case, the conservative to liberal change, if it existed at all, was relatively minor.

But confronting educational bias builds the ability to think as others might --- a very desirable intellectual skill and is a skill too often inadequately developed. Winning people over to your side requires you to speak to their loves and fears, not your own, and effective negotiation requires you to understand what is the value to you and those you wish to win over, and seek to trade off something of no value to you but great value to the others for something that is of great value to you but no real value to the others. Looking thru the eyes of those who you disagree with is just as valuable as looking thru your own eyes, so long as you can tell the difference. Exposure to bias different from your own is good for you. I get the impression that Sowell sees education as a process of indoctrination instead of a process of developing reasoning and communication skills that enables the educated to formulate and communicate rational opinions.

When I see people complain about not including anti global warming study along side of pro global warming study or Creationism along side evolution, I an reminded of how many of those complainers are the ones who want to prohibit discussion of most birth control methods but allow discussion of “just say no” birth control. Bias exists at the left, the right, and in the center. We ought to learn to live with the biases of others to the same extent that we expect them to live with ours, and if nothing else, gain something from being forced to deal with biases, either ours or theirs.