Nine days after reentering the White House last January, President Trump issued an executive order to end "indoctrination" in American schools. The first sentence of the order called on schools to "instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation," which sounds a whole lot like indoctrination to me.

I've been thinking about Trump's order during the recent controversy in Oklahoma, where state superintendent Ryan Walters has engaged Prager University to create an assessment test for new teachers. Oklahoma had already given schools the green light to use Prager's history videos, which Walters described as "factually based, with no left-wing indoctrination."

But Prager most certainly engages in its own brand of indoctrination. And if you don't believe me, listen to its founder. In a 2023 speech, Dennis Prager noted that his organization had been accused of indoctrinating students.

"Which is true," Prager said, pleading guilty as charged. "We bring doctrines to children. That's a very fair statement. But what is the bad of our indoctrination?"

That's the big question for all of us, in these hyper-polarized times. What's bad about indoctrination in schools? Here's what: it closes minds instead of opening them. All of us imagine that our own political positions are "factually based" — to quote Ryan Walters — and that everyone else is ignorant or misinformed. But Americans can and do reason from the same facts to different conclusions. We need to let our kids in on........

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