The Mythical Line Between Indoctrination and Education

by Jon Walker                                                                                                  Vol. VI, No. 2, March 1993

As the dust settles on the Paul Simmons controversy at Southern Seminary, there will be continued charges that Southern Baptist conservatives are trying to establish institutions of indoctrination at the seminaries throughout the convention. Southern Baptists hearing the accusations need to understand one important point before they pass any judgment about what is happening at these institutions: No form or method of education can ever be truly neutral. Although the term "academic freedom" implies there can be education free of agenda, the reality is every teacher carries into the classroom a philosophy, complete with principles and values, that is revealed not only in the content he chooses to teach, but also by the very methods he uses to teach that content.

The question, then, is not, "Where do you draw the line between indoctrination and education?" The real question deals with the type of student-product an educational institution is trying to produce.

Most of us do not like the term product when applied to education, but that is the point: Like it or not, every educational institution produces some sort of a student-product. We would have little use for education in this country if our academic institutions were doing nothing more than educating for education's sake. In fact, if someone is not changed or improved through education, we tend to consider his education a failure. Imagine how disillusioned we Baptists would feel if, after years of study in one of our seminaries, our ministers were no better equipped for ministry than before they enrolled.

Our seminaries are for equipping people for ministry, and the battles for control of them are not about academic freedom or indoctrination: they are about how best to equip our Southern Baptist ministers and about what type of student-product will emerge from our educational institutions.

While it is common to hear the term "academic freedom" tossed about in the indoctrination debate, few voices are acknowledging that all educational institutions have a world view that gives birth to specific principles and values. Howard R. Bowen, in his book Investment in Learning (1977), wrote, "Though most institutions have a strong tradition of freedom of thought for students as well as faculty and of aversion to overt indoctrination, in practice they are far from neutral in their influence upon students. In most institutions, there is a prevailing conception of what the educated man or woman should be like." (emphasis Walker's).

In other words, most institutions have an idea of the type of student-product they are trying to produce. There is an agenda, whether highlighted or hidden, that affects even the classroom content. James Billington, a former history professor at Princeton, wrote in a 1984 essay for U.S. News and World Report, "In [the teaching of] history, for example, the prevailing mode of thought suggests that people's actions are not the result of conscious moral choice but of a combination of socioeconomic pressures and psychosexual drives. This conveys a sense that history is made by broad, impersonal forces – a perspective that diminishes the importance of individual choice and of the moral component of that choice. There's a tendency to see things in a deterministic way and not to study what is most human for people – their anguish, achievements, and aspirations. This view of people helps make us a less caring society and may also play a role in the decreasing enthusiasm for politics."

What is taught in the classroom and how it is taught changes a student. That is what education is all about – to effect change. And don't forget it is a system. Trustees determine the direction of an institution, administrators figure out how to make the plan work, and professors have to take that plan and turn it into a reality that engages and entices the minds of students.

It is a carefully planned, highly interdependent system. If one part of the system changes direction, then it begins to impact all the other parts of the system. For instance, the institution's mission statement may say one student-product is desired, but a professor who disagrees with the institution's direction can, consciously or unconsciously, begin producing a different student-product.

Educational research indicates professors have tremendous influence upon their students. Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard professor specializing in moral development, suggested in his 1981 essays that it was impossible for a college teacher not to transmit his personal values to his students. The author of Communication and Human Behavior (1984), B.D. Ruben, indicated a university professor carries more influence than the average person, even when he is speaking out of the area of his expertise.

A professor's influence can even be subtle and unconscious. Fuhrmann and Grasha, in their book, A Practical Handbook for College Teachers (1983), wrote that, even if an educator avoids controversial moral issues, he will still introduce personal values into the classroom. They added, "In particular, our choice of classroom goals, our emotional reactions in educational settings, and our perceptions of the classroom environment are related to our values.... We may have chosen group projects over independent term papers for a final course requirement. Or we may have decided to lecture rather than to use group methods. Such choices reflect our personal values. In the former case we chose collaboration over independence, and in the latter we chose personal control and authority over delegation and collaboration."

When you hear the shrill accusations of indoctrination, remember it is impossible for any professor or any institution to reach true objectivity. The best they can do is try to be objective, and the first step toward that objectivity is to acknowledge a bias, rather than to argue there is none.

Diversity of opinion and attitude may be one of the strengths of an academic community, but it is only fair that everybody involved, especially the students, know exactly where the institution stands when it comes to principles and values, and when it comes to the classroom agenda.

In the words of J.E. Coleman, author of The Master Teacher and the Art of Teaching (1967), freedom, even in academics, is not the absence of all restraint. It is "submission to the best and the fullest truth that can be known." Within the educational institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention, what the fullest truth is and where it can be found should not be in question.

[Jon Walker is (in 1993) pastor of Vaughan Baptist Church, Vaughan, NC, as well as a divinity student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.]