RETURN
Gary K. Clabaugh
Professor Emeritus, La Salle University
A worried émigré from Israel recently asked me if I thought it was acceptable for her daughter’s university professor to consistently take an anti-Israel stance. His class deals with Israeli history and this professor, who is a Jew, consistently blasts Israel. In his very first class, for instance, he unreservedly condemned Israel’s creation, saying it was a profound injustice to the resident Arabs.
This émigré mom worries that her daughter, born and raised in Israel, will learn to despise the country of her birth. She also wonders if any college professor should take sides on unresolved controversial issues.[1]
My initial reaction was to say that a professor should not take sides on such issues, but provide alternative perspectives and help students carefully consider issues. Upon further reflection, though, I concluded that there is more to it than that.
In the first place, most students can, and often do, ignore instruction no matter how forceful or prolonged. I know a woman, for instance, who went through 8 years of Catholic schooling conducted by old style nuns who took no prisoners. Yet she is remarkably ignorant of Catholic doctrine.
I asked her, “Given years of religious instruction, how is it possible for you to be so uninformed?” She replied, “I tuned them out.” I asked her why? She said, “I think it was when they told us it was a sin to save the life of the mother if it required sacrificing her unborn baby. That seemed very wrong to me. What if the mother had other children who loved and needed her? What of her husband? They also told us that babies were born in a state of sin. That really turned me off. What an evil thing to say about obvious innocents.” Then I asked, “So you simply ignored years of additional instruction?” She replied, “Yep, pretty much.”
This is not a one-off example. It frequently happens that recipients of religious indoctrination fail to become true believers. In fact, such one-sided instruction can provoke students to reject the entire ideology. When I was in fifth grade, for instance, I asked my Sunday school teacher: “What happens when people die who have never even heard of Jesus?” She replied: “They go to hell.” I responded, “That doesn’t seem fair.” She responded by reciting John 14:6 where Jesus is supposed to have said, “No man cometh unto the father but by me.”
Still dissatisfied, I continued to insist that it was unfair to sentence people who never even heard of Jesus to an eternity of fiery agony. It was then that she informed me that Sunday school was “not a debating society,” and angrily said that if I was “unhappy with the Bible’s answer” I could leave.
I gathered my courage and did just that. My uncontributed Sunday school offering paid for 10 pinball games at a near-bye corner store. I played pinball on additional Sabbaths until my mother found me out. She was very unhappy. But only until she learned the reason. Then she granted absolution. She didn’t think an eternity in hell on an ignorance rap was fair either.
So what did my Sunday school teacher teach me? That her version of Christianity was unworthy of my allegiance. Which shows not only can indoctrination be ignored, it can backfire. She didn’t indoctrinate me, she convinced me her faith was unworthy.
Moreover, professors, teachers, parents and the general public all tend to overestimate the impact of instruction. In my 46 years as a professor I taught thousands of undergraduates and was repeatedly astonished by how little they actually remembered of their previous instruction. For instance, many of them found it impossible to convert their raw test scores, say, 39 correct out of 50, to a percentage. Also most of them could not identify the principle combatants in World Wars I, II, the Korean War nor the Vietnam War. Few had any idea when the Great Depression occurred and many did not know that it even happened. Most could not find China on an outline map. One thought that France was our northern neighbor because, “people speak French up there.” Another opined that Heinrich Himmler must be the chap who invented that life saving maneuver for people who are choking. In short, after 13 or 14 years of formal instruction they remained ignoramuses.
These kids were not dolts. They were middle of the pack freshmen and sophomores who, I’m sure, could easily master a complex new social media application in minutes. But most of them manifested only transitory (long enough to pass the test) interest in what is taught in schools. And trying to transform this purely instrumental interest into an intrinsic one is akin to trying to make a dog happy by wagging his tail for him.
I doubt my nearly half a century experience with this type of academic amnesia is unusual. I’ll wager that student ignorance of even recently past instruction is common in higher education institutions throughout the country. That’s why provosts and deans would rather fight rabid Pit Bulls than require their students to pass a comprehensive college core subjects test before awarding them a degree. They know full well that far too many of them would flunk.
How is any of this relevant to our émigré mother’s worries? Well, given the perishable nature of school taught knowledge, it seems highly unlikely that some preachy pedagogue is going to convert her daughter or anyone else. After our proselytizing professor delivers still another impassioned plea for the Palestinian cause you can bet his student’s overriding interest will be, “Is this going to be on the test?” And certainly none of them will go out looking for a photo of Yasser Arafat to frame and hang on their wall.
Of course, it might be a different story if a student is undecided and actually cares. Then a partisan professor’s propaganda might prove decisive. But the young lady in question is decidedly pro-Israel. So odds are she will not only reject her professor’s criticisms — including those that are well-founded, by the way — but become even more devoted to her former homeland. Oppositional reactions often occur when deeply held beliefs are challenged.
Is it proper for her professor, or any professor, to conduct class in a one-sided manner? No, not if the issues are multi-faceted. Taking sides does grant professors the extravagance of self-righteousness. The problem with that is he or she is setting too great a value on their own biases and instruction, and too little value on their intellectual responsibility.
[1] For a more complete discussion of this and related issues see: http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Indoctrination.html