By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs)
October 21, 2025
When I was a teenager, I came across a little book written by James Clavell, entitled "The Children's Story." It is often classified as dystopian fiction and typically interpreted as an illustration of how easy it is to manipulate human minds.
Consisting of only 4,300 words, this work has been adapted into a television drama on PBS and has also been translated into other languages.
To summarize the story, it is set in an unspecified future date following an event in which the United States was conquered by the unnamed "them." Schools are being taken over by the new regime, and all teachers are being replaced by foreign ones from "their" country. Through a series of seemingly spontaneous but carefully planned tactics, the teacher brainwashes a classroom full of children in a mere 23 minutes.
Clavell wrote this story in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and during the Vietnam War. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened the year before its publication. As such, readers would naturally interpret Clavell's work as a common fear of the Soviet expansion and a warning against communism. Yet, the author himself admitted that the inspiration for this story was when his little daughter one day came home from school, proud of having learned the Pledge of Allegiance and memorized it by heart.
Thus, it follows that Clavell was not only critiquing the communists but also the United States educational system.
As I often say, all education is indoctrination. Even as the United States of the 1960s publicly prided itself as a land of the free, and its media and schools purported to promote free speech and critical thinking, the United States also has a history of censorship, forced thought conformity, and persecution of unfavored views. Even as President Franklin D. Roosevelt is now remembered for ending the Great Depression and winning a war against fascism, his domestic policy included the signing of the 1940 Smith Act, and mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans. In the name of preventing a communist revolution in the United States and to defeating fascism, FDR acted like a dictator himself. During the Second World War, the press was heavily censored. Anarchists, socialists, and communists were often arrested, and if they were foreigners, deported (Most famously, Emma Goldman was deported, and Eugene Debs was imprisoned). COINTELPRO and the House Un-American Activities Committee went on a nationwide hunt for "suspected communists," which targeted millions. Gay organizations could not mail their newsletters because the U.S. Post Office Department banned such publications as being "obscene," even if they contained no porn or smut. The vision of America as a free speech maximalist nation is a rather recent one, thanks to the Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s and later.
Even in 2025, indoctrination is sold as patriotic "anti-woke" education, and censorship is billed as promoting the freedom of speech and religion, and free speech and free thought are equated to terrorism. In my lifetime, I saw something similar taking place during the years following 9/11, the age of "patriotic correctness."
On the flip side of it, during the pandemic years, no one could openly criticize the now-discredited "lockdown" policy or the COVID-19 vaccines without being ostracized from society. The mainstream media, social media, and peer pressures ensured ideological conformity in the name of "science."
As a teen who read "The Children's Story," I had a very different take on it. What if the "new teacher" wasn't really manipulating or brainwashing the kids? After all, she (unnamed in the original, except that "her name sounded pretty") not only encouraged the children to question their parents, their religious upbringing, and most importantly, their indoctrination into unquestioned patriotism (pledging allegiance to the United States without even understanding what those words meant), but also elevated Johnny, the class skeptic who did not hesitate to question her and to speak up. From a different perspective, it could be said that she wasn't brainwashing them but rather, gently and lovingly helping them understand how they had been conditioned and indoctrinated by their schooling and by their parents -- and that she was merely deprogramming them to think more freely -- and perhaps more importantly, be kids. That the "new teacher" did not instill fear to exact unquestioned obedience at gunpoint perhaps sounded disconcerting to Clavell's American audience, who preferred a more authoritarian and muscular approach to "conquest." And just as in our days, some Americans fear such teachers far more than the old-fashioned ones who wielded a paddle for spanking.
The Children's Story, by James Clavell
PBS Mobil Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of the same
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