Regarding a recent letter (“Keep anti-American ideologies out of school,” Star-Advertiser, Aug. 1): When people write about education and limiting it to one particular viewpoint or excluding independent thinking, it reveals that they do not understand what education is trying to accomplish. American education is not indoctrination. It should be about exposing students to different views. What does “American ideology” cover? Is it teaching that America is the greatest country in the world, but ignoring 400 years of racial discrimination or ignoring how Hawaii became a state?

I was in a recent discussion in which I was told that Democrats are “socialist communists.” My question about the basic tenets of communist philosophy was greeted with silence, so I asked for a definition of socialism and was told, “I don’t know.”

Limiting education to “American ideology” without a better definition of what that covers must be described for what it really is: narrow-mindedness.

Edward B. Hanel, Jr.

Kailua

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