Kerry McDonald – March 25, 2022
Tolerance of different viewpoints and values is a key principle of a free society, and yet in classrooms and on campuses across the country, young people increasingly self-censor and self-silence to avoid speaking out against the dominant cultural narrative.
Some students may not even realize that there are different viewpoints and values, conditioned as they are from their early days of schooling to accept whatever their teachers say. And their teachers are being similarly conditioned, spending time in colleges of education that tie grades to ideological activism and link achievement to allegiance with an approved interpretation of concepts like “social justice” and critical race theory.
All of this can lead parents to wonder what they can do to help prevent their children from being indoctrinated into a belief system that may run counter to their own values or may not allow for viewpoint diversity.
The answer, according to Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, is to undoctrinate your kids. Kerrigan Snyder is the author of the new and important book, Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools—and What We Can Do About It.
In this week’s episode of the LiberatED podcast, I talk to her about her book and the startling trends she sees in both K-12 classrooms and on college campuses across the country.
You can listen to the LiberatED podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts, or visit liberatedpocast.com.
Originally published at Fee.org. Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.
Photo: iStock-kevajefimija
