Indoctrination In The Children's Story

Analysis of The Children’s Story Indoctrination is to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions and beliefs. Indoctrination was seen in the book The Children’s Story by James Clavell where the New Teacher was the one indoctrinating the children. The New Teacher indoctrinates the children to change their beliefs to become similar to the New Teacher’s nation since there was war between the New Teacher’s country and the students’.The New Teacher indoctrinates the children by changing their religious beliefs, disrupting the children's patriotism and influencing their ways of living. The New Teacher destroys the children’s patriotism by using logic to …show more content…
This quote shows that the New Teacher used false logic to cover her main ulterior motive of making the children think that cutting the flag is reasonable by making them think that having a piece of something means it is valuable to you-- it isn’t in this case. In other words, her reasoning is logical but only to cover up her main plan of disrupting the children’s patriotism. Although the children did not notice this due to their lack of cognitive maturity; this makes indoctrination easier for the New Teacher (NT). Throughout the book, we can see that children are very susceptible to indoctrination. We see this first when the children are told to memorize the Pledge of Allegiance. They did not question the meaning of it and all they knew was that they have to memorize it because it is “patriotic”. This relates to the topic sentence by showing that even if things are in its natural form, but presented with logic, then the children, or perhaps anyone, will believe in the reasoning. For example, the Pledge of Allegiance’ evidence for being patriotic was that it is part of the nation, but this patriotism is downgraded as the meaning of the text is unbeknownst to the children. Similarly, the …show more content…
One of the children argued,“‘My dad says it's wrong to have secrets from him.’ ‘But he has secrets that he shares with mommy and not with you, doesn't he?’” This evidence shows one of many occurrences in which the NT uses realization in her arguments. It is effective since afterwards the children nodded. The author might be trying to accentuate the NT’s “realization method” since this method is tightly linked with skepticism which is a major part of the short story. How it is linked is that realization is the product of skepticism. And so this evidence shows how the NT produces realization from the skepticism that should be present in the children’s mind. Or more specifically, when the child said “My dad says it's wrong to have secrets from him” lacks skepticism by showing that the child simply follows his father and not doubting what he is saying and thus the NT made her realize that his father is hypocritical. In short, she influenced the children’s lifestyle by making them aware on what they are in allegiance with; to not be blind about what is being taught; that is what the teacher is trying to