Education vs. Indoctrination

Education is the cure for ignorance by introducing you to conflicting information and requiring you to defend your assumptions in the face of cogent evidence to the contrary; indoctrination is learning the doctrine of a group to which you have already given your allegiance.

Education is a lifelong endeavor.  To be educated to the extent possible at any given moment in history is simply not enough.  As knowledge grows; re-education is necessary.  Education is hard work and it hurts.  It does not feel good when cherished assumptions are proven false.  It does not feel good to realize you have been wrong all of your life.  In the face of the hard work needed to learn about then apply newly found knowledge to your life, the lazy person finds ways of avoiding this work.    

Education demands change; indoctrination forbids change.

Indoctrination, especially religious indoctrination, is reinforcing your cherished assumptions.  It isn’t hard; being told you are right and have been right all along is easy.  Change is not required of you since the information you receive is a lump sum, from one book, and is revealed, not learned.  Change is forbidden on the threat of eternal punishment.  How else could it be?  For the believer, change means changing, not his beliefs, but the actual Word of God.

Knowledge is the incremental acquisition of truth through education.  Indoctrination is the suppression and manipulation of truth in defense of a fixed and unchangeable revelation.  Knowledge is on-going and, for all practical purposes, un-ending.  Indoctrination is a one-time inoculation against further knowledge and is fixed in time and space to a particular moment in the existence of a particular group.

That education is superior to indoctrination was once upon a time obvious to all but the ignorant and uneducated.  How did we get to our current situation where the beliefs and opinions of the uneducated are given equal footing with those of the educated? 

Public education enforced by law is necessary for a cohesive society.  Children must be taught to think; not what to think.  They must be educated to live in the world as it is, not as it was and most certainly not as a radical, anarchistic movement would have it to be.  When the ignorant are allowed to remove their children from the public education system they are not simply giving them a different sort of education, they are denying them an education at all.  They turn their backs on education and substitute indoctrination.

This is child abuse far more harmful than beating or sexual abuse.  This is imprisoning their children in a dark room and forbidding them the light of day.  This is taking a free mind and making it a slave to ignorance.  This is child sacrifice to a God they did not freely choose to accept.  This is an unimaginable, unforgivable evil.  That this is an accepted practice in our country is in direct conflict with and denial of the concept of freedom to which we give lip-service and little else.

This is the last and largest bastion of the treatment of children as property to be disposed of at their father’s pleasure. 

That the ignorant will instill their children with their ignorance is sadly unavoidable.  What is not unavoidable is the cooperation of the state in this folly.  Yet that is what has been and is still allowed to occur.

We have allowed generations of children to be raised as automatons, foot soldiers in a war they were never given the option to decide if they wanted to fight or not.  We have allowed a separate nation to grow like a cancer in our country.  A nation that has stolen our history and befouled the beliefs of our Founding Fathers.  A nation intent on domination not only of our country but the world.

Hannibal is living inside the Gates and is our neighbor we wave to on our way to work.  We have come to accept this situation as normal.  We have no one to blame but ourselves.

A nation divided against itself cannot stand.

How soon we have forgotten the hard won lessons of history.

We have learned nothing from the past and now we are to suffer for our own stupidity.  It is to be expected that the ignorant, the gullible, the infantile will find leaders to tell them what they want to hear.  Leaders who rise to the top because they are more willing to lie than the honest men who insist on the truth.  In a country of the blind how could you tell the person who claims to see isn’t just as blind as you or is lying about what he sees? 

Ignorance is blind. 

And if the blind are allowed to carry and stockpile weapons, whose fault is it when the shooting starts?