tim's experiment

What a glorious confusion now reigns over the subject of brainwashing! This was an almost unheard of word in Hong Kong two months ago. Now the government stands accused of wishing to brainwash students, the protesters are accused of already being brainwashed by sneaky democrats, religious schools are being accused of brainwashing their pupils. This trend reached its glorious apogee on Saturday when Pierce Lam (whose name, significantly, is almost an anagram of Senile Crap) announced in the letters page of Pravda that most of the population of Hong Kong had been brainwashed by the colonial government. Many of the protesters are too young to have had anything to do with the colonial government so this represents a considerable achievement on someone’s part.

Now let us be clear about one thing. Brainwashing, in the strict sense, was an early invention of our beloved PRC. People with erroneous opinions where locked up together. They were then placed under tremendous pressure to change their views. This came not only from the guards, but also from their fellow prisoners, who could increase their chances of release by developing a fanatical enthusiasm for the correct view. Under these circumstances many people did appear to change their opinions, and for a while exaggerated accounts circulated of the effectiveness of the process. It later emerged that most of the people subjected to brainwashing would revert to their former views – though no doubt with a good deal of caution over expressing them – soon after they emerged from the process. If they managed to escape from the People’s Paradise they tended not only to revert to their previous views but also to be extremely critical of the brainwashing process, which was after all a clear violation both of human rights and the rule of law.

Nobody has been doing, is doing, or wishes to do anything like this is Hong Kong. To that extent all this talk of brainwashing is grossly exaggerated.

Having said which, there is a kernel of scientific truth in the idea that biassed national education will dispose children to believe things which most of us do not accept as true. In the first place, although telling people something does not necessarily lead them to believe it, it does make it easier for them to believe it. This can be demonstrated in simple experiments. Your brain finds it easier to handle concepts with which it is familiar. If you tell people every morning that Big Brother Loves You, a proposition for which there is no other evidence, they will not all believe it. Probably most of them will not believe it. But they will find it easier to believe it, so more people will believe it than would have been the case if the class spent the first five minutes of every lesson reciting the Lords Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance. Readers can probably confirm this from their own experience. I, for example, was subjected to a good deal of Christian education. This did not, in the end, make me religious. But I do find it easier, having heard the story so often, to believe that God spoke to Moses from a burning bush than to believe, as Mr Mitt Romney does, that the Angel Moroni gave some gold tablets to Joseph Smith in 1823.

Religious schools are I suppose intended to produce believers in the religion concerned. But it is a commonplace observation that this does not always happen. Many people who attend religous schools do not emerge as believers in the religion concerned – or in many cases in any religion. In a sense, if you are a parent who does not believe in that religion than sending your child to the school is a gamble.  Probably it increases the chance that your kid will eventually become a Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist or whichever brand the school purveys. On the other hand this may happen anyway. So let us say that the chances of your kid getting religion increase from 5 per cent to 10 per cent. You may think that is worth it if his chances of getting into university increase from 15 per cent to 30 per cent. After all getting religion is not so bad. Many parents, I think, have an uneasy feeling that ethical education is not their forte and a religious school will be good at this.

Now parents who wish their kids to grow up as fanatical super-patriots can increase the chance of that happening by sending their offspring to Left-wing schools. As with religion there are no doubt many pupils in Left-wing schools who do not pick up the intended message and some who react vigorously against it. You get improved odds, not certainty. The question is not whether this option should be available but whether it should be compulsory.

Teachers (of whom I am still one) will wonder at this point whether their efforts are to be exploited. Behind every lesson is the unstated but deeply felt notion that this stuff is important, useful, and true. Attempts to insert things into the curriculum which lack one or all of these characteristics make us uncomfortable. One wishes to do a good job. That usually means that at the end of the lesson the students believe what they have been told. If honesty requires us to announce at the beginning of the session that the content of this class is a load of politically-motivated twaddle then learning is probably not going to take place. Teachers who reflect on the material they are putting over will realise that much of it is rather arbitrary and local. We teach reading and writing in accordance with the local conventions. Systems for reading and writing vary. Mathematics also has an element of arbitrary local choice in it. We do not have to count in tens, hundreds and thousands, but we do. This was more obvious when I was at school because we still had to learn that there were 12 pennies in a shilling, 16 ounces in a pound, eight furlongs in a mile, and so on. So in a sense the teacher is offering as essential and permanent what is to some extent contingent and local. This is only acceptable if there is a clear consensus in favour of this content as useful and truthful. The trouble with the idea of a “China Model” is that it doesn’t represent a consensus at all … even in China. Teaching children the values we all share is one thing. Teaching them the values that officials would like us to share is another.