Nine days after reentering the White House last January, President Trump issued an executive order to end “indoctrination” in American schools. The first sentence of the order called on schools to “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation,” which sounds a whole lot like indoctrination to me.
I’ve been thinking about Trump’s order during the recent controversy in Oklahoma, where state superintendent Ryan Walters has engaged Prager University to create an assessment test for new teachers. Oklahoma had already given schools the green light to use Prager’s history videos, which Walters described as “factually based, with no left-wing indoctrination.”
But Prager most certainly engages in its own brand of indoctrination. And if you don’t believe me, listen to its founder. In a 2023 speech, Dennis Prager noted that his organization had been accused of indoctrinating students.
“Which is true,” Prager said, pleading guilty as charged. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement. But what is the bad of our indoctrination?”
That’s the big question for all of us, in these hyper-polarized times. What’s bad about indoctrination in schools? Here’s what: it closes minds instead of opening them. All of us imagine that our own political positions are “factually based” — to quote Ryan Walters — and that everyone else is ignorant or misinformed. But Americans can and do reason from the same facts to different conclusions. We need to let our kids in on that little secret, instead of pretending there’s one right answer.
We’ve seen this movie before. Back in 1994, amid a controversy over proposed national history standards, right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh complained that the standards distorted the past by including too much material about slavery, sexism and other misdeeds. “History is real simple,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “You know what history is? It’s what happened.”
That’s what my own students have learned to call the “just-the-facts fallacy” — that if we simply teach “what happened,” everything else will fall into place. If we just teach the Declaration of Independence, our students will know that the nation was born in liberty. If we just teach the Constitution, they’ll understand their rights as citizens and the limits on their government.
And you can hear that in Walters’ defense of the Prager-developed “America First” certification test for new Oklahoma teachers, which he said would focus heavily on the ideas of the Founding Fathers. “Go read the documents,” Walters said in a recent interview. “It’s very obvious what they believed.”
But no, it isn’t. For nearly 250 years, Americans have debated the meanings of the Declaration and Constitution. It’s naive to imagine that everyone who reads them will think the same way.
We don’t want to admit it, though. Instead, across the political spectrum, we insist that our facts tell the real story.
Witness the 2021 left-wing campaign in San Francisco to rename 44 schools — including those named for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, because they were slaveholders. Asked whether the school board had consulted historians about the matter, the chair of its renaming committee said there was nothing to discuss.
“What would be the point?” he asked. “Either it happened or it didn’t.”
But the whole point of history is that facts don’t speak for themselves; they require interpretation. You can acknowledge that Washington and Jefferson practiced slavery but disagree about how we should remember them.
Case in point: several months after voting to remove the names of Washington and Jefferson, the San Francisco school board reversed course and decided to retain them.
Facts do matter, but it must be added that Prager University has sometimes played fast and loose with them. Its video about Frederick Douglass says that America “began the conversation” about ending slavery. That’s false: abolitionist campaigns in Europe predated the American movement. Most Western nations banned slavery before the U.S. did so.
But the real problem with Prager — which is an activist organization, not a university — isn’t that it spreads falsehoods. It’s that it presents its own perspectives as fact. Consider its video about Black educational leader Booker T. Washington, who tells a group of white children that “future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”
That raises one of the most complicated questions in American life: What do we owe people who suffered because of our historical mistakes and crimes? Again, there’s no simple answer. But it’s dishonest for Ryan Walters — or anyone else — to assert that Prager’s view is “factually based,” when it’s really based on an ideology.
Ditto for Walters’ claim that the separation of church and state is a “myth,” which he has invoked in his effort to place Bibles in every grade 5 through 12 classroom. The First Amendment bars the establishment of religion, but we have always disagreed what that means. It’s absurd — indeed, it’s false — to imagine that the facts of that history speak in one voice.
So let’s put aside the myth of consensus and resolve to present our differences to our students, openly and honestly, so they can decide what they think. Walters doesn’t want that — instead, like Trump, he wants to indoctrinate a singular view of the nation. The real question is whether the rest of us are willing to subject our own perspectives to debate, and to let our children disagree with us.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
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