When you accuse a teacher of brainwashing students, you are saying more about yourself than you realize. Every accusation is, in essence, a confession.

Accusing a teacher of brainwashing is like blaming a fisherman for using the wrong type of flamethrower. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the task itself. I couldn’t “brainwash” a student if I wanted to. If I could, they’d be a lot more cooperative when I’m trying to make my point.

The simple truth is that a student’s own will makes them teachable. But “teachable” is a tricky word. It reminds me of the concept of falsifiability in science—an idea that requires a mental twist to grasp fully. Falsifiability means we evaluate the strength of an idea by how vulnerable it is to being disproven. When your goal is to find the truth, not just to be right, you must be willing to expose your beliefs to the unforgiving bellows of repeated analysis.

You tell on yourself when you accuse me of brainwashing because it shows a stunted understanding of what it means to learn.

It is not my job to teach a student what to believe. Actually, strike that. I do teach one belief: I teach them to believe in the Self. All of existence is filtered through the Self, and if you don’t understand your own filter, you are bound to stumble into a dramatic abyss.

Other than that, I have nothing to sell. If a student holds a belief contrary to mine, it is not my place to disabuse them of it. It is my job to help that student formulate the strongest possible argument in support of that belief. If I have faith in the logic of my own truth, I must also have faith that it can withstand scrutiny. I must give my student the dignity of following their own logic until they reach a breakthrough or a cul-de-sac. If he reaches a breakthrough, he has taught me something; if he reaches a dead end, I can show him how to recalibrate.

I am not here to indoctrinate. We are partners in the pursuit of a shared truth: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.

You do not teach through browbeating; that is simply indoctrination. Good teaching is through example and inspiration. I must provide the tools to come to a chosen conclusion. Only after allowing my students to explore every avenue with these tools can I ask them to defend their truth. Because now that truth has been earned, a student will defend it with the conviction of someone defending their own beating heart. I didn’t give them this knowledge, they earned it. I just stood by and showed the way. I pointed to some doors and explained, “This lock is a little sticky, you have to move the key just so,” or “This door jams, so you have to lift it a little for the lock to align.”

This method is critical because it also teaches the ever-evolving nature of subjective truth and how it interacts with objectivity. Navigating the boundary between the subjective and the objective is one of the most dizzying aspects of becoming a person. The friction point between the two is the very cradle of our shared reality.

It is my responsibility to provide my students with the resources to navigate the paradox of being free in a society. “A free country” is itself an oxymoron. A person is born free, but is forever in chains. You may live in the most progressive democracy in the universe, but you are not entirely free. The moment another psyche enters the chat, you are affecting another being. Even if you lord over them like a master, you are still not entirely free—you have merely set up an interdependent dynamic.

I teach my students that this dynamic is dizzying, exhilarating, nauseating, fascinating, beautiful, and ultimately preferable to any alternative. I’ll lead the obstinate stoner to the end of his own argument. We’ll follow the thread from “I just want to be free to sleep and smoke weed” and see that a life spent in a haze is not a life at all. We’ll chip away and find the genuine desire: to be free to sleep when he’s tired and wake up feeling rested and inspired. We dig deeper and realize it’s not that he wants to sleep all the time, but that he doesn’t want to feel so damn tired all the time. We find out he’d rather be on the football team, but—Mr. It’s fucking hard and I’m just not sure if I can handle it, so I feel stuck and man, can you just let me get some water…

That is teaching.

If I start demanding you see the world my way, I’m no better than a fascist. It is important to me that I teach you how to follow paths of logic. It is important to me that you know how to make your own paths when the well-worn ones are outdated.

Brainwashing, perverting impressionable minds, indoctrination… it all looks so different. I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance in my sleep. I can hear the drone of the Nicene Creed in my head. It’s all just sound and fury, signifying nothing. Words imposed top-down are just hammering sounds that drive us into the ground. Words wrapped around the murmurings of the heart are far more nourishing.

When I read “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, I feel in my chest the foreboding essence embedded in his words. Every time I read that terse poem, I wear it like a cloak against the zeitgeist winds. The gyre can widen, but as long as I am in the center, I can hold.