Thread by @TheTattooedProf

I wrote a thread on this a few years back, but it's even more alarming now. The Right's authoritarian-verging-on-totalitarian approach to education--ban CRT! cameras in classrooms! no thoughtcrimes!--isn't an aberration, nor will it be overcome by an appeal to "the facts." 1/

These laws spring out of the Right's own vision of what "education" really is. Whether it's the fundamentalist homeschoolers, or evangelical church camps and purity culture, or the Young Republicans, they don't attract members so much as take hostages. /2

In this vein, education is really indoctrination. There is "our" correct view (Biblical inerrancy! A Christian Nation! White Supremacy!) and the heresies of "the other." Orthodoxy is rigidly enforced, often by adults who leverage peer influence also. Deviation is shunned. /3

And kids are thrust into this regime from the beginning. They're surrounded by this stuff all the time--from their homeschool curriculum to Fox News and OAN being on TV to their church youth groups. This is by design; the Right is a pedagogical ecosphere with no alternatives. /4

Like the David Foster Wallace story asked: how would a fish describe water? /5

(The #emptythepews hashtag from @C_Stroop has excellent, albeit chilling, narratives of how this process works). The epistemic bubble is vacuum-sealed. You can view this whole cultural project as basically a Right-wing liturgy, a confession of faith. /6

This is why we keep seeing more extreme iterations; you can never be "conservative enough" in this game. There's always a higher level of purity you can reach. And it becomes a crusade--in all senses of the term. /7

This is why the Right believes all of these wild-ass stories about teachers "indoctrinating" kids, about schoolchildren being forced into tears bc they had to "apologize for being white." Those stories match their own "educational" vision. They universalize their own approach! /8

Because it's been so successful for them (politically speaking, at least), they cannot conceive of any other approach to educating the young. Their own weaponized approach to schooling must be the way "the left" does things, too. Why wouldn't they? /9

This universalizing mirrors the typical Right wing approach to Others--"our views, our experiences, our culture are the default, the norm from which all else deviates." So if progressives say they're not indoctrinating, they have to be lying, right?

It's. All. Projection. /10

The Right does not view younger folks as autonomous, capable thinkers. This perception has been passed down from generational experience. They literally cannot conceive how anyone would teach w/o indoctrination as the goal. Because that's how it's always worked for them. /11

This battle isn't going to be won by "facts." Because it's a clash between those of us who see education as the practice of freedom (to use bell hooks's words) and those who see education as domination and control. The stakes couldn't be higher. /fin