4. How to Fight Indoctrination within Education
Evil Indoctrinating Teachers?
“Then surely, I went on, no one willingly goes after evil or what he thinks to be evil”.
Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras
Before we get into the discussion of the new forms of indoctrination and how they might be challenged, it is perhaps important to establish a rough definition of the term itself and to identify those aspects of indoctrination that may not be entirely new.
The Concept of Indoctrination
Indoctrination involves teaching the young to hold beliefs, including true beliefs, uncritically. Generally liberal educators have been the strongest and most consistent opponents of indoctrination because of the priority they instinctively give to the intellectual freedom of the individual. In their view indoctrination is at best careless miseducation and at worst the intentional abuse of adult power.
As we might expect, philosophers of education have kept themselves busy over the years dissecting how we might use the term. Some have argued that in discussing indoctrination we should give priority to the intentions of teachers, whilst others have proposed that it is more important to focus on the student experience. All seem to agree that indoctrination relates to the selection and exclusion of intellectually significant content, as well as the ways in which teachers engage their pupils.
My Partial Focus and Experience
Here I should note that this blog series is mostly written by a teacher for other teachers. Given this focus some readers may find me a little evasive on the substance of the moral and political debates I mention. The reason for this is that I intend to give priority to the specifically pedagogic issues and principles they raise. If I were writing with one of my other personas, say as a father of two girls and a boy, or perhaps as a heavily taxed and generally irate citizen of England, then I would no doubt approach these debates with a different set of gloves on, or perhaps no gloves at all.
It might also be the case that some readers will find me perhaps overly forgiving of my fellow teachers. Here I will plead guilty to accentuating the positive and I will also state that I make no claim to excellence in my own professional practice. What I can honestly declare is that I have been teaching in England’s capital city for more than twenty years, mostly in Further Education colleges, but also for periods in schools. In this time, I have generally been impressed by my colleagues. Teachers, in my admittedly partial experience, generally intend to do good, and when they do bad, they often do so from a position of well meaning ignorance, hence my opening quote. This brings us to one long standing feature of indoctrination within English education today.
Individual Acts of Unconscious Indoctrination
It goes without saying that for liberal educators such as myself indoctrination is a very, very serious educational bad, so bad that it is tempting to see those who indoctrinate as being motivated by a consciously malign, perhaps even evil, intent. There are, of course, far too many examples of teachers indoctrinating within English education today and the problem really does appear to be getting worse. However, much of it, in my view, is unintentional, which is one reason that I am optimistic about the possibility of change.
Teachers who passionately believe something to be true, beautiful or good, I’d suggest, can easily slip from passionate explanation into uncritical advocacy, as it really does take a special kind of emotional and intellectual effort to see the merit and integrity of beliefs that you 'know' to be wrong. We all have our biases. None of this diminishes the significance of the problem of indoctrination from a student’s point of view, which is the most important one, but it really ought to modify how we address individual teachers when they get things wrong.
As long as humans are taught by other humans who care about what they teach, and care about those that they teach, errors of indoctrination will no doubt be made. The real issue, I’d suggest, is not individual mistakes, but how we foster a collective educational culture in which these errors are quickly recognised and corrected. To create the conditions for this culture we must also identify the factors that encourage what might be described as indoctrination blindness.
As I suggested in the first post, we don’t need to invent any new arguments to make indoctrination visible. The liberal arguments against indoctrination already exist and are embedded within English educational culture. It is true, sadly, that the liberal view of education, which best opposes indoctrination, is on the defensive, but it is also the case, I believe, that with a bit of determined effort it can be revitalised.