Few people seem to have a clear definition of indoctrination, and thus call anything that another is teaching, indoctrination (e.g., “Leftists professors are indoctrinating their students,” “Those fundamentalist Christians are indoctrinating their kids,” or “Facebook, and, or, Twitter are indoctrinating their users.”). While indoctrination involves pushing a certain opinion, it is also much more. It is the comprehensive effort of actively or passively disseminating a particular viewpoint, popular set of thoughts, or creed either right or wrong. The passive aspect of the indoctrination process is key. Because people who are indoctrinated with a certain narrative or ideology do not arrive at the intended conclusions through their own thinking, but they hear the same thing repeated over and over in different ways until they finally accept it as evidential and true. They may have never heard the other side. That is why the left will always try to infiltrate the young. They start with the earliest grade in school and within a few grades, they will have believers. However, everything has to be subtle. If it is too open, parents may hear things from their children and begin to complain. Teachers have to be indoctrinated first and that is where our elite institutions of higher education come in. Because indoctrination happens in the absence of thinking, many teachers who engage in indoctrination do so unconsciously, subjecting youth to what was in their textbooks. They take what they’re given and pass it along without evaluating the content. If it is a college text, written by a brilliant person, then it must be true. Ideologues will even intervene at the school level by writing the scripts for teachers, teacher study plans. This is the way LGBT advocacy and anti-Semitic fabrications have become included in their lessons. (LGBT, or GLBT, is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.) Even grade school children are being exposed to that kind of indoctrination and the expectation for them to conform, in some cases, it comes with penalties if they do not. The indoctrination is such that to a young person there is no room to question and/or to see a different side or angle. They are not given an opportunity to see both sides. There is only one way and it is clearly laid out in the classroom. Thoughtless acceptance is the expectation and to do otherwise comes with consequences. Thoughtlessness is essential in most classrooms in today’s world. As the fictional demon Screwtape, from C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters,” states in a letter to Wormwood, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” A person who really thinks will eventually, somewhere down the road, reason himself out of the things he heard at school. He may be exposed to that side that wasn’t taught and ‘see’, and therefore become free of the false teachings and will search for the ‘truths of things’ on his own. Humans are born with curious minds and the system today, tries to train that openness out of them. Fortunately, we were also born versatile, with the ability to spring back from much of the false indoctrination. If not, there would be little hope for mankind to survive liberalism. An example is the fact that whole nations have recovered from years of communist oppression, where they were under that thumb of oppression for decades. The whole Chinese population has heard nothing but Mao Tse-tung’s propaganda for decades, and they survived, proving resilience.
Obviously, there are circumstances where indoctrination is essential, sometimes even to preserve life. I recall when I was going through basic training as both a young army combat recruit and later, when I was assigned to a Military Police Company. The indoctrination that I was receiving, in both cases, was designed to preserve my life. The Prophet Joseph Smith has taught; “Teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves.” Teaching doctrine and indoctrination are too opposite principles. Thank God, for our ‘Agency’ and we must also thank Him for ‘Opposition in All Things’. For therein comes both our spiritual and mental strength. If possible, we must always insist on hearing both or all sides of every story and If possible, the reasoning related to both, as well.