“Indoctrination” is defined as “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.” Over the years…decades…centuries…many busybody entities, groups and individuals, for whom peddling outrage to the masses is a business and/or hobby, have rolled this old chestnut out and flung it at institutions of higher education.

Like chimps flinging feces, they beat their chests and hop around in hysterics, howling and handwaving their message of the insidious brainwashing college professors are subjecting poor defenseless students to on campuses from sea to shining sea.

The word “teach”, comes from the Old English taecan, which means “to show, point out, or demonstrate.” Over the past 34-years I have been on both sides of this show, point out, and demonstrate three ring dog and pony show, a college student that a teacher was attempting to teach, and now as a teacher that is attempting to teach.

Although admittedly anecdotal, throughout all this learning and all this teaching, I have yet to witness indoctrination of any sort. “That’s exactly what somebody who has been indoctrinated and is now making a living indoctrinating would say” howl the drivers of the Mini-Winnie outrage wagon as they troll around for recruits to help spread their message of the doom, the gloom and the ruin all these over-educated idiots are infecting our society with.

Sure, there’s a few wack jobs in the ranks of college professors, there’s a few wack jobs in the ranks of every profession, and if you don’t think there are any wack jobs at your place of work, you are probably the wack job. So it goes.

One of the issues is that the spotlight reflexively swings towards wack jobs, and with all the spotlights we have swinging around nowadays it makes it seem as though there are wack jobs lurking in every classroom, closet or cucumber patch.

While these peddlers of pandemonium dance about in the spotlight, the modest middle majority toils in the dusk around the edges, doing what they can with whatever they have for whoever they can. The “can-can” the dusky dance of those that get it done.

So, in 34-years of bumbling towards being as overly educated and as idiotic as my oft concussed cognition will allow, the prevailing wind on college campuses has carried the message of learning how to think, rather than being told what to think, and never accepting a set of beliefs, or most anything, uncritically. Question everything, and more importantly, everyone…especially yourself.

Do many young people change when they go to college? Of course, but this change is not due to “indoctrination”, it’s due to distance away from all they’ve ever known for the first 18-years of their lives, it’s due to incubation with their own thoughts, it’s due to new friends, it’s due to their progression towards an autonomous being that is developing the agency to be who they truly want to be in this world.

Sometimes who they truly want to be in this world is at odds with who those that care for them had wanted or hoped they would be when they sent them out into the world. I suppose it’s human nature to look for a place to lay the blame when things don’t turn out how we wanted, but I can assure you that very few college students listen intently enough to a teacher to get indoctrinated or brainwashed.

We simply can’t compete with Tic-Toc, or whatever app is dazzling their minds and eyes from the screens of their ever-present rectangles of tantalizing tangles of truths and tall tales. In the words of Bob Marley, “Every little thing is gonna be alright.” Or it won’t. Such is life.