The Thread #2, Educate or Indoctrinate?

Today, we know that a lot of the things that we learned in school during those early years at Weddington were pure indoctrination. Anything dealing with race was to be challenged in the near future. It was all built around telling us that we were better and different than the black people in our community.
The relationship between religion and public education was such that the dominant religion of the area, Protestant Christianity, had full access to our learning and could use school time freely and openly to indoctrinate our young minds. There was no line between church and public school.
Literature was chosen to idealize the dominant culture and disregard all others. "Dick and Jane" had no black, yellow, or red characters. All of our stories, all of our books, and all of our lessons were about being good and religious white people. When other races were presented to us, they were presented as caricatures, not real people. Uncle Remus is a perfect example. Who can forget "Little Black Sambo?"
Our songs about black people were songs like, "Carry Me Back To Old Virginie" and "Old Black Joe." Let me go through some lines of the former.

"Carry me back to ole Virginia, that's where the cotton and the corn and taters grow. That's where the bird's sing so sweet in the springtime. That's where this old darkie's heart is long to go."

Black folks were darkies not people. In "Old Black Joe", his head is bending low. He is submissive. "Gone are the days when his heart was young and gay" in the cotton fields. Another line calls their hearts "so happy and so free." We were taught that black folks loved their toil in the fields and the good ones always wanted to go back.
Everywhere, including school, we played Cowboys and Indians. The game was pretty cut and dry. The cowboys killed the Indians. If you were one who was an Indian, you were expected to yell while covering and uncovering your mouth in a fast rhythm. You were expected to die when you were shot at at close range. Cowboys never died.
Our history was about white people. We were taught that white people had done everything worth doing because we were never told that anyone else did anything of significance. Every American that we learned about was a white person, period.
Now, here is the disconnect. While what we were learning was mostly indoctrination, outside of the sciences, the skills that we learned were the skills of learning. Within our culture, we learned all the right rules for getting along with others and being good citizens. It would be left to the individual to realize that he or she had gone through an indoctrination process.
Everything that I said in Thread 1 was true. Elementary school at Weddington was a very good experience for me. But, I was indoctrinated into a world that was to come crumbling down very soon. It was the skills that I learned there that I took with me into adulthood. The idealized world of the Christian white person faded into oblivion.
Unfortunately, most of the people who went through what I went through as a child never realized what had been done to them. Pick up any local paper today, talk to any group of arbitrarily chosen people, or open up the internet. There are a lot of people here who were effectively indoctrinated into a world of lies for a lifetime, and they have probably done the same to their children.
One of the really depressing aspects of today is that I expected those from other regions of the country where slavery was not what it was in the South, where understandings of Native Americans was better, and where Hispanics have always been a significant part of the population, to be less indoctrinated into the white world fairy tale, and that is not the case.
There is a present argument circulating that President Obama wants to indoctrinate our young people rather than educate them. I think that the President will have to stand in a long line if that is the line he wants to get into. The problem is that those who argue this are the products of strong indoctrination themselves.
Now, what you choose to allow your son or daughter to hear, see, smell, feel, or taste is up to you. I know children well enough to know that if they start feeling that you have alterior motives beyond their safety, then many will rebel at some point.
Those children not trusted with the freedom of making up their on minds today may well be the radicals that you have to battle tomorrow. The most avid white radicals grown here in the South were all indoctrinated into the white world when children. My parents did me a favor, sort of, by allowing me to be fully indoctrinated into the world they knew. When time came to rebel, I knew exactly what it was that I was rebelling against.