(07-14-2023, 03:59 PM)Nately120 Wrote: When you agree with what is being taught to kids it is guiding and mentoring thrm to get on the right path. When you disagree it is brainwashing, indoctrination and grooming.
It's less about control and more about how "right" you see the influence being.
People tend not to say I was brainwashed into being a Steeler fan and I love it. Or I was groomed to love jesus and it changed my life.
Or I joined the army and they systematically destroyed my sense of self and then reprogrammed me into productive living.
People agree with us because they're smart or have seen the light. People disagree with us because they've been misled, brainwashed and indoctrinated.
Agree. Every family in every society is tasked with socializing children--that means making decisions about what they should learn and what not.
That means "control" over children--their behavior and beliefs. No society could reproduce itself if that were not the case.
It gets complicateder in modern industrial societies with public education.
Professional educators, in consultation with communities, business, and the state, determine what children need to know to do well in
in an advanced industrial society--which is also a democracy, at least in name. They also need to learn things that help the country as a whole.
That means school curricula come to be based on a consensus of "experts" about what is accurate history or science, and what should be introduced at what level.
And "experts" can easily conflict with parents, especially on subjects like history and science--and it's rarely because the parents know more than the experts. It's because progressing, adapting curricula conflict with history parents may have learned 30 years previously, or with religious doctrine. That's a conflict which has been with us with the advent of modernity, and it occurs world wide. Parents who resist change aren't always in the wrong, especially in non-democratic states.
If the parents think "indoctrination" is just what other people do, the conflict is likely to sharpen very quickly, especially as in this country law requires children to be educated somehow somewhere. And especially if parents can be organized, by themselves or by a party looking for issues.
Regarding the latter, we've seen how mass fear can be generated by fake threats to consolidate political power--e.g. the dozen or so states who passed laws preventing incorporation of Sharia Law into state law. That can be switched to school issues as well, e.g., banning CRT because it teaches what Fox says is racism, and that apparently includes many Black novelists, or banning LGBTQ anything--to prevent "indoctrination." Don't let "them" groom your children! Every litterbox should be removed from every classroom NOW!
This resonates with fringe conspiracies about Communist control of our ed system which I occasionally encountered in RW books and pamphlets back in the '60s, before the advent of online news and the mainstreaming of fringe politics.
Comes down to a decision about what sort of society we should be producing or re-producing as we "groom" younger generations to take their place in the adult world alongside us (or after us, in the case of retired persons such as myself).
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