Every generation of parents writes some version of this letter, and every one of them is sure the indoctrination runs in the other direction. Teach them to think sounds like nobody's position until two parents disagree on what counts as thinking and what counts as an agenda. I'd bet the professor gets this letter and one saying the opposite in the same week.
A Letter to My Favorite Teacher
Thought
Thought
Every generation of parents writes some version of this letter, and every one of them is sure the indoctrination runs in the other direction. Teach them to think sounds like nobody's position until two parents disagree on what counts as thinking and what
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Dear Professor,
There is something beautiful about revolution.
I don't know if I have ever told you this, but revolution seems to me one of the most beautiful words human beings have ever invented. To revolutionize something is to turn upside down what seemed condemned to remain the same. It is to discover a flower where nobody expected anything to grow. It is to fall in love. To give someone chocolates for no reason. To learn a new song, change your mind, forgive someone, invent a question that did not exist before.
And perhaps the most important revolution of all happens inside a child's head when he stops thinking exactly the way his parents think.
Then puberty arrives, and that wonderful little catastrophe begins: the child starts to suspect that adults may not necessarily be right.
What a beautiful thing!
Suddenly there are questions.
Why?
What if not?
Who said so?
How do we know?
Why do I have to believe this?
Why do you think that?
And that is where something begins that no teacher should ever want to stop: independent thought.
That is why I am writing to you.
Because I do believe in revolutions, Professor. But I have one condition:
Let them be revolutions of human beings, not political parties.
You know the Gospel tells us about a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go looking for the one who is lost.
Well, I know the real shepherd who does that.
It is you.
Because a good teacher does not abandon the student who has fallen behind. He does not say, “I already have enough.” He does not turn a child into a forgotten statistic.
He goes looking for him.
And that is precisely why it worries me when children are handed an ideology as if it were a vaccine against thinking.
Let me tell you something that made me think.
One day my brother had to stay until ten at night waiting for the parents of a child to come and pick him up. He missed his first bowling game. He spent all those hours waiting.
And we could have been furious.
But then came the explanation: the parents had not arrived because, quite simply, they had forgotten that it was their turn to pick him up.
They had not died in a motorcycle accident.
There had been no tragedy.
They had simply forgotten.
And that seems to me an extraordinary political lesson:
Sometimes we believe we are living through a great historical tragedy when, in reality, someone simply forgot to do his job.
That is why I want a revolution of flowers.
A revolution of love.
A revolution of chocolates.
A revolution of boys and girls discovering that they can think.
A revolution of teachers making a child who understood nothing suddenly say:
“Ah!”
But please, never a political revolution for children.
Because politicians are another species.
They do not really care about the flag when the flag is no longer useful to them.
Nor about religion.
Nor about the poor.
Nor about the rich.
Nor even about their own principles once those principles stop being useful.
Many of them are lawyers of circumstance.
They wait for something to happen, and then, miraculously, discover that they have always been on the right side of history.
They do not need to believe in anything.
They only need to know how to take advantage of whatever is there.
And I do not want you to end up watching your students become little soldiers for somebody else's cause.
I do not want to see one of them become a neo-Nazi.
Nor do I want to see another become Che Guevara.
I do not want to see them shot by the police.
Nor by the “enemy side.”
I do not want a boy who is still discovering who he is to end up dying for a flag he was not even old enough to choose.
Because teaching history is one thing.
Teaching hatred is another.
Explaining a revolution is one thing.
Manufacturing revolutionaries is something entirely different.
And teaching politics is one thing.
Putting politics inside a child's head before he has learned how to defend his own mind is another.
So I would ask you for one thing, Professor.
If one day a politician comes along whom you truly trust, do not show me his speech first.
Show me that man working.
Let him do anything.
Fix a bicycle.
Carry a box.
Sweep a street.
Work in a shop.
Take care of a child.
Do something useful with his own hands, rather than merely with the hands of other people.
That day, perhaps, I will believe him.
Because the day a politician can prove that he knows how to work without needing a flag behind him, a crowd in front of him, and a camera turned on, perhaps we can begin talking about trust.
Until then, let children be children.
Let them fall in love.
Let them make mistakes.
Let them change their minds.
Let them argue with us.
Let them discover that their parents can be wrong.
Let them discover that their teachers can be wrong too.
Let them even discover that they themselves can be wrong.
Because that is the real revolution.
The one that needs no rifles.
The one that needs no martyrs.
The one that needs no enemies.
The one that does not require a child to die in order to prove that he was right.
Professor, I beg you:
Do not hand children the filthy politics of either side.
Not the left.
Not the right.
Not the professional patriots.
Not the professional revolutionaries.
Not those who promise to save the people.
Not those who promise to save the nation.
Teach them, before anything else, how to think.
And once they know how to think, let them choose.
Because if an adult has to indoctrinate a child in order to make that child think like him, perhaps the problem is not with the child.
Perhaps the idea was never that good.
And so I will end with a question that seems impossible to avoid:
How many countries has your political dogma fixed?
Zero!
So perhaps we can begin by fixing something much smaller.
One mind.
Just one.
Like the shepherd.
Like you.
Thoughts
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The letter uses politics for two different things. One is parties, flags, campaigns, and I'm with you on keeping those out of a classroom. The other is how people who disagree decide things together, and a kid arguing with a teacher about why is already doing that one.
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Every generation of parents writes some version of this letter, and every one of them is sure the indoctrination runs in the other direction. Teach them to think sounds like nobody's position until two parents disagree on what counts as thinking and what counts as an agenda. I'd bet the professor gets this letter and one saying the opposite in the same week.
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There's an old saying that the point of an open mind, like an open mouth, is to close it again on something solid. I'd press the letter right there. Teaching a child to doubt his parents and his teachers is half the job, and a kid who has only learned to doubt is easy prey for the first confident voice that comes along. The professor still has to hand them something worth holding on to.
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Dear Professor,