Education or Indoctrination? The Practices That Make the Difference

By Bear Howard

If you listen to American media in 2025, you’ll hear a steady drumbeat that colleges don’t educate so much as indoctrinate. After the killing of campus activist Charlie Kirk this week, Fox News guests framed his appeal in exactly those terms: he “recognized ‘indoctrination on college campuses,” a cause his admirers now say they’ll carry on. Fox News.

In the same news cycle, Fox ran a story about Texas A&M’s regents demanding an audit of courses after a classroom dispute; a system leader said, bluntly, that “indoctrination [has] no place” in classrooms. Fox News  and Newsmax columnists, for their part, have been publishing pieces with titles like “Internal Rot Will Collapse U.S. Academia,” linking campus politics to “antisemitic indoctrination” and political correctness. Newsmax.

And Kirk’s own “American Comeback Tour” was marketed as a push to “equip students to push back against left-wing indoctrination in academia.” Fox News

The rhetoric isn’t confined to cable. From the White House came a January 29, 2025 executive order promising to end “radical indoctrination,” initially aimed at K-12 but feeding the broader mood music about schooling and politics. Universities pushed back—hundreds of presidents signed a public letter decrying “political interference” and warning about overreach. The White House+1 Meanwhile, public trust in higher education ticked up off a recent low—still divided, but rising to 42% expressing high confidence, according to Gallup in July—evidence that the public conversation is more complicated than a simple collapse of faith. Gallup.com

So how do you challenge the “college = indoctrination” mindset when it surfaces—in a council meeting, a parents’ group, a classroom, or a family chat?

You don’t start with ideology. You start with method.

Education and indoctrination aren’t rival teams; they’re different processes with different goals. Education is a set of practices that build transferable skills—reasoning, evidence-weighing, the ability to compare claims and change course when the facts demand it. Indoctrination is a social technology designed to secure loyalty to a fixed answer. When the argument shifts from what people believe to how beliefs are formed and tested, you move the conversation from tribal identity to observable practices.

Here’s what that looks like in the wild. A course that educates assigns the strongest competing views and requires students to engage both, often asking them to argue the position they oppose and score each other’s reasoning against a transparent rubric. A course that indoctrinates shields students from disagreement or offers only caricatures of the other side, and it rewards agreement over argument quality. Education invites replication and falsifiability—“What evidence would change your mind?” Indoctrination imposes a purity test—“What’s wrong with you that you don’t already agree?”

This distinction matters because it gives skeptics something to inspect. When a commentator claims a university “only teaches one side,” the fastest pressure test is: Show me the syllabus. Are there serious counter-arguments on the reading list, or only straw men? Is grading tied to use of sources and logic, or to arriving at the professor’s preferred conclusion? Are guest speakers paired with structured Q&A that rewards tough, respectful engagement? These are public, auditable details, not vibes.

The current media environment actually helps make that case. If a Fox segment cites a specific class, don’t fight the label—follow the evidence back to that class and see whether the practices look like education or indoctrination. If they look like indoctrination, call it out and fix it. If they look like education, show your work. Transparency turns a slogan into a test. (And, yes, the climate on many campuses is tense; even FIRE’s 2025 survey found students increasingly hostile to controversial speakers—evidence that all sides need to recommit to principled free expression if they want genuine learning. The Guardian)

There’s also a practical conversational move that lowers the temperature: ask for particulars. “Which assignment? Which line in the rubric? What exactly made disagreement unsafe?” If the answer is a generalized vibe—“Everyone knows”—then set a falsifiability bar: “What would count as proof this course educates rather than indoctrinates?” If no imaginable evidence would change the critic’s mind, you’ve uncovered a closed belief, not an argument.

That doesn’t mean universities get a pass. The only durable way to defuse the indoctrination narrative is to hard-wire practices that even critics can respect. Publish syllabi and rubrics. Require comparative arguments and red-team days in general-ed courses. Protect academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in the same breath. Evaluate students on reasoning quality and source use, not the stance they land on. Make speaker series genuinely plural—and moderate Q&A with rules that privilege short questions, answer time, and rebuttal slots over performative heckling. If a state demands an audit, welcome it—while insisting that policymakers respect the boundary between setting outcomes (e.g., graduates should analyze competing claims) and dictating conclusions (e.g., graduates must endorse a party line). The first is accountability; the second is, ironically, how indoctrination works.

If you’re the person in the room who has to answer the “indoctrination” charge, try a 20-second reset that keeps the door open:

I don’t want students to think like me; I want them to think well. If a course rewards agreement, that’s indoctrination. If it rewards evidence and lets students challenge the professor, that’s education. Let’s look at the syllabus and grading rubric together.

That kind of invitation reframes the dispute around shared values—fairness, transparency, courage in debate. It also sidesteps a trap in the 2025 media conversation, where clips and headlines are optimized for heat. When a Newsmax essay declares that “rot” and “indoctrination” are everywhere, or a tour press release promises to “push back against left-wing indoctrination,” you can grant the concern in principle and still insist on the inspection step in practice. Newsmax+1 And when universities warn about “government overreach,” they owe the public the same transparency in return. PBS

The hopeful part is that the country isn’t locked into a doom loop. Confidence in higher ed rose this summer for the first time in years—modestly, but measurably. That suggests many Americans still want colleges to be what the best ones are at their best: bias-correction gyms where ideas compete under rules everyone can see. Gallup.com

In the end, don’t fight over the word indoctrination. Fight for practices anyone—left, right, or unaffiliated—can audit: open syllabi, competing readings, transparent grading, rigorous debate, measurable gains in critical thinking. If those practices are present, the indoctrination balloon deflates. If they aren’t, reform is warranted. Either way, you’ve upgraded the conversation from a tribal accusation to shared quality control.