Students Are Indoctrinated In Leftist Ideology

Woodrow Wilson wrote of his years as an academic administrator when he felt “I should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.”

This indoctrination can start as early as elementary school, where students are encouraged or required to write about controversial issues, sometimes in letters to public officials.  More fundamentally, the indoctrination process habituates them to taking sides on weighty and complex issues after hearing just one side of those issues.  Moreover, they are habituated to venting their emotions instead of analyzing conflicting evidence and dissecting conflicting arguments.  In short, they are led to prepackaged conclusions, instead of being equipped with the intellectual tools to reach their own conclusions, including conclusions different from those of their teachers.  In many colleges and universities, whole academic departments are devoted to particular prepackaged conclusions - whether on race, the environment or other subjects, under such names as black, women’s or environmental “studies.”  Few, if any, of these “studies” include conflicting visions and conflicting evidence, as educational rather than ideological criteria might require.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.110