When Education Becomes Indoctrination: A Memoir from the Frontlines of State-Sanctioned Thought Control 💭🚫
🛑 This is not fiction. This is the actual language used in a public directive to Oklahoma teachers.
June 25, 2025.
A memo went out to Oklahoma public schools yesterday. Not a lesson plan, not a policy update—but a directive from the Superintendent of Public Instruction warning against “Liberal, pro-terrorist agendas” in classrooms.
This is not satire. This is not dystopian fiction. This is my home state. This is happening now.
The document is saturated with charged language: woke, radicalized, terrorist-sympathizing. Phrases once reserved for cable news fear-mongering are now embedded in official state communications about how teachers must discuss geopolitical conflict with children.
What’s at stake here is not just a political squabble about left versus right. It’s the soul of education itself. It’s whether classrooms will remain spaces for inquiry—or become echo chambers for authoritarian talking points.
There’s a strange irony in a document that decries “indoctrination” while commanding absolute ideological loyalty.
There’s danger in an administration that demands obedience under the guise of patriotism.
There’s grief in realizing that students will be taught not how to think, but what to think.
I was raised here. I walked these halls. And I wonder how my younger self would have survived this era of thought policing. I wonder if the teachers who shaped me—brilliant, empathetic, courageous thinkers—are now being forced into silence. I wonder what happens when our children ask the wrong questions.
The truth is: a democracy that punishes curiosity is not a democracy at all.
And this memo? It’s a warning siren.
The authoritarian turn doesn’t come overnight. It arrives in the language of “safety.” It arrives cloaked in flags and dripping with disdain for dissent. It tells you to be afraid of the question, and comforted by the answer it provides.
But I refuse to be comforted by lies.
And I still believe that education—real education—is the most powerful form of resistance we have left.
Viva la résistance,
—Rebecca M. Bell
@rmbellwrites
Ps.
They rewrote the lesson
while we blinked,
chalk dust thick
with smoke.
But I’ve carved truth
into desk legs
before—
and I’ll do it again
with fire.