Our Education System Doesn’t Educate, It Indoctrinates

How to Educate Your Kids Better

Our education system teaches your child what to think, not how to think.

Children are taught to follow orders, and regurgitate information. Compliance and groupthink are rewarded.

Which is a tragedy, because my education 30 to 50 years ago taught me HOW to think.

I was put in the “Future Global Problem Solvers” club, in junior high school. It wasn’t led by an adult; we were just given thorny problems to discuss and propose solutions to. We met at the public library on Saturdays and loved it.

I was in an Honors Colloquium class in college, among others like it in the English program at BYU, sitting in a circle, using the Socratic method to defend our ideas and discuss them.

Our teacher asked us questions about the book we were assigned to read each week, rather than instructing us how to think.

He pressed us to support our thesis, rather than just repeat our thesis. (I’ve been known to tell my husband or children, as well as my own university students: “Support that thesis, rather than just repeating it emphatically!”)

The LDS church that owned BYU, the university I went to as an undergraduate, and our Colloquium teacher even took us on field trips to other churches.

In grad school, studying to be a therapist, I was absolutely indoctrinated. With what is now called “woke-ism,” or government-as-parent Marxist theories and an unquestioning demand to accept LGB (now LGBTQIA+ where I believe + will include pedophilia and transhumanism).

I learned some good things, too, but I have spent the last 25 years de-programming myself.

Our education system still relies on the systems developed by warlords and plantation owners to control slaves.

If you educate your children well, then they’re far more likely to get educated, rather than indoctrinated, if you send them off to let someone else educate them. Some children have the critical thinking skills to even question their teachers’ false doctrines.

One of my grad-school professors spent an entire class period working with the class to answer the question, “What is a family?” The resulting definition was, “A group of people who live together and care about each other.”

I regret to this day being shocked silent, in that 90-minute “education.”

(I was raised to follow instructions, and being “obedient” was the main character trait my parents were going for, something else I had to de-program myself from. I appreciate many things about my upbringing, one of them being my parents’ commitment to family.)

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My personal observation is that many kids go to school not because it’s the best education for them, but because parents want bragging rights at the cocktail party. (“My son just finished his PhD at Northwestern”--how many times have you heard something like that?)--and because kids want the status of the credentialed degrees.

I hope you’ll have every conversation about important topics with your kids while they’re minors, especially before they’re 11 or 12 years old.

A new parent may not know that at about age 11, “latency phase” kicks in, where it’s “developmentally normal” for the primary influence on your child to be their peers, far more than you.

It was Freud and his successors, including Erikson, who developed these theories, and while I reject most of Freud’s theories, my experience has certainly included a “hardening” of my children’s minds against my values and theories, starting at about age 11 or 12.

Piaget is another well known child development theorist, who refers to the “Messianic Complex” of about age 17 to 21, wherein a child very naturally differentiates from his parents, and often develops contrarian beliefs, and can be highly critical of his parents.

My own youngest son was right on target, highly critical of me during those years. Thankfully, right on time, at age 22, he is coming around and re-defining his beliefs to be more willing to consider the values he was taught in his upbringing. I have seen the same in my other children.

Since I failed to talk one of my children out of the Covid vaccines, and resulting health issues, he has even been asking for health coaching, which is a great blessing to both me and him.

Don’t trust that ONE conversation “does the job.” The “drip method” – shorter conversations, but lots of them – are so much more effective. Human beings learn by repetition. Use that time in the car, with your children! It’s highly valuable, because they can’t get away!

Don’t be daunted by your child saying things like, “Mom! I know! [Repeats what you’ve said before.]” Remind yourself, “This is developmentally normal.” Put that on a 3x5 card on your mirror, if necessary!

My older daughter said, “Yeah, Mom, you taught me about sex in one big download, when I was 7 years old. But I was totally overwhelmed by it, and then you didn’t talk about it again!” Valid criticism.

Don’t forget to talk about:

1. Pharma/vaccines
2. Sex
3. What you know about health, wellness, and nutrition (showing you doing it is more powerful than talking about it)
4. Caring as much about others as yourself
5. Caring about yourself, setting boundaries, the importance of saying NO
6. Listening to your intuition, a powerful tool of your psyche
7. Love of God, and the lack of validity in the “evolved from one-celled organisms” evolutionary theory
8. Alcohol and drugs
9. For girls:

“It’s your body, and you can say no, don’t be pressured into doing something you don’t want to do, in a relationship.”

10. For boys:

“You bring that girl back in the same condition she was in, or better! She is ‘precious cargo’ in your car!” and

“No means no, and sometimes ‘no’ is body language or other words besides ‘no’!” and

“Stand up and give the older lady your seat on the bus, and open the door for a lady or older person.”

Those are just a few examples. Some of those, I really wish I’d had more conversations with my kids about–maybe I could have averted some disasters.

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