On The Bob Zadek Show, indoctrination is the word used for the opposite of education: the capture of students’ minds by whoever controls the schools, the textbooks or the compulsory programs of the state. The show’s treatments span a decade, from a 2010 discussion of history-textbook politics to a 2020 discussion of mandatory national service, and the term carries the same charge each time — that indoctrination forecloses thought rather than inviting it.
Textbooks and the ownership of history
In a 2010 episode, Bob Zadek framed the fight over American history textbooks as a fight over “who owns history” and “who owns America,” naming California, North Carolina and Texas as the battlegrounds. He distinguished facts from interpretation: there are facts such as July 4th, 1776 and the Battle of Yorktown, but for the most part the study of history involves interpretation, and scholars disagree about what the facts mean. The question he posed was who decides which interpretation is taught Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Bob described an elected position in Texas that he called a Schoolbook Commissioner, noting that the label was his own and might not be precise, and said that every decade the holders of that position get to rewrite history. He asked what a campaign platform for such an office would look like — changing history to make it very Christian, or very Hispanic — and called the politicization of these systems out of hand. He also said California has a complex, bureaucratic and politicized process of writing textbooks in which there is no attempt to invite thinking, only a battle over what to tell students.
Bob’s proposed remedy was procedural. Where history involves interpretation — whether the Founders were religious or basically secular, the significance of many of the Founders owning slaves, how the Founding Fathers saw women’s rights — textbooks should present more than one point of view, introducing one as what some historians believe and another as what other historians believe, and inviting students to read further and decide for themselves. He said he vehemently opposed any indoctrination of students with any political point of view, calling it harmful to students and a denial of the opportunity to think for themselves. To indoctrinate, he argued, is to cut off all thought and all debate; it is anti-intellectual and anti-critical thinking, and it was happening in Texas and in California.
Bob invoked the educator Diane Ravitch, whom he described as a very smart person who had devoted her life to educational theory and who had for many years supported charter schools, vouchers and free choice in education before changing her mind. Quoting her comments on California and textbook writing in general, he said she called it “outright censorship” and said it dumbs down textbooks and makes them bland, far less interesting than anything children might see in the movies, even in G-rated movies or TV. He compared the indoctrination of American students to the madrassas and other cultures that use the schoolroom to capture minds, and said it was being done here in this country.
As a concrete instance, Bob cited guidelines he attributed to the publisher McGraw-Hill for elementary and high school texts. According to Bob, the guidelines required that of the people pictured in textbooks, 40% be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African American, 7% Asian and 3% Native American, with 5% disabled and 5% over the age of 55. He treated the quotas as evidence that the facts do not matter and that textbooks are designed to satisfy the political process, joking that litigation might be needed to decide whether a pictured person looked 56 or 54.
Indoctrination outside the history classroom
The topic returned in a 2012 episode on student loans, in conversation with Arvin Vora, who was described as running for Congress in Maryland’s fifth congressional district against Steny Hoyer as a libertarian and as the author of Lies, Damn Lies, and College Admissions. Bob raised the idea that any student receiving a student loan might be required to take a series of courses on American history, on the American political system, and on what is needed to make an intelligent decision about voting — a proposal he tied to Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that an educated electorate was the only way the country could survive America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Vora answered that textbooks are slanted, and not only history and political textbooks but even biology textbooks. He described a Prentice Hall biology book used widely in high school in which the illustration of natural selection showed baby birds begging for food from their mother rather than the fastest cheetah or the tallest giraffe. In Vora’s reading, the example suggested that some baby birds are better at begging, much as some college professors are better at begging for grants from the government. From this he concluded that making a specific course mandatory opens the door wide to political indoctrination: if it can happen in biology, it will certainly happen in history. Bob restated the point as education driven by political considerations rather than academic, and Vora agreed.
Vora also argued that the test of a functioning citizen is whether a person can provide for himself and function without government subsidies — paying debts and taxes — and noted that in Jefferson’s time there was no internet, no libraries everywhere and no Amazon.com, whereas now there are do-it-yourself approaches to university-level education, naming Khan Academy and programs like his own.
National service and the collectivist trend
In a 2020 episode, the word was applied to proposals for mandatory national service. Bob described a scheme in which an 18-year-old who wants to go to college or start a career would be required to perform tasks a politician determines — cleaning kitchens, scrubbing floors, cutting down trees — at below-market wages, with jail as the alternative for refusal Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020). He said the clear recommendation was to take a job at below-market wages against one’s will or go to jail, and joked about people heading north to Canada until they turn 26.
Guest Warren Gibson said an aspect scarier than what Bob described is that if young people can be convinced that service is their duty, they are hooked — that if they buy into having basically no right to their own life, they are owned. Bob replied that “convince” was far too polite a term and asked whether Gibson meant indoctrinate; Gibson agreed that was a better word and said much of the report in question was about indoctrination and propaganda, with many recommendations concerning what it called education — courses available at universities and so forth — that sound bland and mild but add up to convincing people that they do not have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that they owe their lives to the state.
Gibson also described a broader trend toward collectivism, amounting to crushing individualism and establishing a collectivist mentality in which everyone must be in lockstep with what is currently accepted on issues like climate or racism. Bob observed that government agencies discussing compulsory public service invariably use the military as the model — the same uniform, profound obedience, following orders, severe punishments for disobedience, respect for chain of authority — and that programs from Maoist China to the Hitler Youth provoke the instinctive fear of indoctrination, of turning the total life of 18-year-olds over to the government to educate, train and indoctrinate for a year against their will. He noted that the idea is not far-fetched, recalling that a year earlier a candidate in the early Democratic primary, John Delaney of Maryland, a progressive and a member of Congress, had been passionate about advocating mandatory public service. Gibson said he was very concerned because the groundwork for collectivization had been laid by the commission’s report, and that the triggering event would be something unanticipated. Bob closed by urging listeners to be vigilant and not to ignore innocent commissions.
Across episodes: no single arc
The 2010 episode treats indoctrination as the capture of history textbooks by elected officials and ideologues, with Bob Zadek proposing multiple-interpretation textbooks as the remedy; the 2012 episode, through Arvin Vora, extends the charge to biology textbooks and warns that mandatory courses would invite political indoctrination; the 2020 episode, with Warren Gibson, applies the term to mandatory national service and to a collectivist trend in which the young are taught that they owe their lives to the state. The excerpts show the same word used against different targets rather than a development in the argument, and the speakers differ each time.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the precise name or composition of the Texas body Bob Zadek discusses, which he explicitly labels with his own term, nor the outcome of any textbook adoption fight. They do not identify the commission whose report Warren Gibson and Bob discuss, nor the report’s title or issuing authority. They do not give the fate of the McGraw-Hill guidelines or any response from the publisher. And they do not report any court case, statute or amendment bearing on indoctrination in the classroom.