Indoctrination and other pedagogical faults
For our third meeting on the system please read the following sections, "Indoctrination and other pedagogical faults" and "Reflective interlude".
The former section corresponds to Kleinig's chapter 5; his chapter 6 is also worth reading in this connection.
The question to ponder is "What seems to you the most important form of miseducation?"
The problem
Sometimes disapproval of what other people are doing by way of instruction issues in the condemnation that they are indoctrinating rather than educating or merely informing their pupils. If it were clear that the people condemned were doing something distinctively different from the rest of us then there wouldn't be much of a philosophical problem here; but it isn't. Some people used to condemn what went on in schools in the Soviet Union or in some Catholic countries as indoctrination but if you looked at such schools you would see pretty much the same as you would here. There would be some differences, of course. In Russia they would teach astronomy, and have classes in Marxism-Leninism; but then we teach genetics and usually have classes in civics and what is called "religious education." And of course, commentators in the Soviet Union and Catholic countries would charge that we are indoctrinating our children to acquiesce in capitalism or individualism or whatever. So there is a job to be done to discover whether the charge of indoctrinating means anything, and, if so, what exactly.
Cynicism
From the way I introduced the problem you can probably see one easy solution: the main function of the term, "indoctrination," at this time is that it simply labels certain forms of teaching of which we disapprove. Just as one might say the word, "democracy," is used to pick out any form of government the speaker approves of (the same variety of opposing usages could be found as with "indoctrination": the Peoples' Republic of China still claims to be doing things democratically). Given that different people can approve and disapprove of a vast range of things, there may be nothing in common, besides the disapproval, when the terminology is used on different occasions or by different speakers.
Kleinig comes close to such a position. He suggests that we might not find many differences in practice between what goes on in our schools and what goes on in Cuban or Jesuit institutions (to take the same sort of cases I used above to suggest how "we" often exemplify indoctrination). He goes on to suggest that we do not generally notice our own indoctrinating.
But this sort of analysis is a little too easy. Of course people can and do misuse language, but in general a term like "indoctrination" or "democracy" is not just expressing approval or disapproval. The evaluative stance is tied to certain features of the thing evaluated. You can see this by noting that no one could call any instruction they disapproved of "indoctrination"; if the teacher beats her pupils, this is to be deprecated, but it doesn't make the activity into indoctrination. (In the case of democracy, someone might approve of the Roman Emperors, or the present Haitian junta, but they could not be called "democratic" for all that.)
In saying that there is some descriptive content attached to words like "indoctrination" I do not have to decide whether there is always the same descriptive content. There is a view (Kleinig mentions it in chapter 13 with respect to the notion of competition) that says that some of our important social, moral, and political concepts (and perhaps others) belong to more than one opposed tradition of thought, so that different speakers will invoke different descriptive factors. Such concepts are then said to be "essentially contestable". You might say, for example, that there is one line of thought about democracy that stresses participation in elections and perhaps other decision-making by all adults in a society, and that there is a different tradition of thought that stresses the taking of action which is in the interests of the majority of the members of a society, whoever may actually make the decisions. Members of these different traditions will approve or disapprove of what they find, depending on whether it has one or the other feature; but there is apparently no way of getting them to accept a unified account of democracy.
There is a related possibility (closer to the truth about indoctrination, I suspect) in which a term has the same basic meaning for different groups but, given their different commitments, it will be applied to different circumstances in the world. To take a crude example, we all know what "being concerned with one's self" means. When I avoid stepping on an insect, it has got nothing to with such care for myself; but if I believed in reincarnation, it might well be motivated as a kind of mutually beneficial action.
The specific content of indoctrination
A lot of the literature, and a good part of Kleinig's discussion, is concerned with the pros and cons of various competing accounts of what it is we are affixing our disapproval to when we condemn some teaching as indoctrination. People have said it is a matter of the content taught (here a major concern has been to delimit what is to count as a "doctrine" on the supposition that you can only indoctrinate someone with doctrines); others have focussed on the teaching methods used (some of the literature here goes into extreme cases like "brain washing"); others have stressed the intentions of the teachers (paralleling here the division of opinion about the role of intention in what shall count as teaching in any case).
When you ask why we pick on this type of content, or these types of methods, or ask what specific intentions an indoctrinator is supposed to have, we end up, says Kleinig, finally concerned with a particular sort of outcome: "it is teaching in which the beliefs, attitudes, values, etc. taught are held in such a way that they are no longer open to full rational assessment" (p. 62).
It is virtually impossible to mark off "doctrines" from the rest of our beliefs, but the ones we typically think of are religious or moral or political claims, of a sort which their defenders want you to live by, not critically investigate. Some methods of inculcating beliefs (rote learning from an early age, the engagement in routines and rituals, emotionally charged presentations) also work fairly well at getting people to accept things without any critical reservations, with no tendency to question or revise in the light of difficulties. You could do this for the multiplication table or Chinese poetry, though no one is likely to. No one wants unquestioning allegiance to such things. But unfortunately a lot of people want unwavering loyalty to their country, or religion, or politics, right or wrong.
As I understand Kleinig, he is claiming that indoctrination is a matter of intellectually disabling a person, making him less able to "rationally assess" certain matters. People may vary to some extent in their "innate" powers of the mind;1 the picture is of their being turned off from using them in certain areas.
Standards of rational assessment
If the question of indoctrination is a matter of disabling full rational assessment of some issue, we must presume that we have some idea of what full rational assessment of it would involve. This opens the way to a certain social or cultural relativity: "our" ideas of what rational assessment involves may not be the same as "theirs". (Take, for example, the standards of those people who claim to believe the literal truth of every sentence in their translation of the Bible.)
We may just have to accept this amount of relativity. It does not disable the concept, since we can still use it within "our" social context to attack teaching that fails to measure up to our standards.
We might also go on to claim that, at least for certain types of issue, there aren't any significant differences in how different groups assess claims. If we can reach agreement that something is a mathematical question, then perhaps it doesn't matter which culture you belong to. Maybe the same could be said for some other types of question. (Though this way of arguing ignores the big problem, of getting the initial agreement on what kind of issue is at stake — once someone accepts that whether the sun stood still over Gideon is a purely factual issue, the game is lost since it is clearly false.)
More important than worrying about differences between cultures is to note that within our own there are differences in the strength of consensus about standards of rational assessment in different areas. There are differences even among mathematicians, though differences based on a vast range of shared assumptions. In most factual areas we have only minor differences. But when it comes to moral questions or religious ones, say, there is much less agreement among us on what should count as (full) rational assessment. (And these are areas where it is anyway more likely that accusations of indoctrination will fly.) So disagreements about whether something is a case of indoctrination may reflect disagreements about the appropriate norms of rational assessment.
Indoctrination and ethnocentricity
We can illustrate the preceding point by taking one kind of disagreement that often arises in discussing indoctrination. It is a commonplace of anthropology that virtually all societies bring their members up to believe that the way that society does things (the language it uses; the foods it eats; the marriage practices it endorses; etc.) is "natural," the only proper way of doing things. What are "arbitrary" choices out of the vast range of biologically possible ways of doing things are presented as necessary, often "god-given." It is a frequent theme in philosophy that we tend to think in terms of "frameworks" of ideas, where we may well be pliant and adaptable within the framework but where we will not turn our critical attention upon the framework itself.
These complementary approaches can easily lead people to think that we all indoctrinate each other in the vast range of "taken for granted" assumptions everyone makes. Part of the problem in dealing with such a claim is that we may well wonder what is required for full rational assessment of these things. Do I really have to do much about the fact that I use the word book for books, instead of kniga or iwe or any number of other possible words we could have used instead? And we can add that none of us is likely to get uptight over anyone who wanted to do things differently; members of what Gellner has called "ironic" cultures are generally pretty tolerant of people who want to live their lives differently.
The heading refers to some lines by A.H. Clough:
Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
They raise very large and difficult questions in moral thinking which we won't now be looking at. But they have relevance to our topic in the following way: Kleinig, as I have interpreted him, says that indoctrination is a matter of disabling a person. We may wish to believe that just as very few students get physically disabled as a result of what goes on in schools so very few get mentally, intellectually disabled either. But it is unquestionable that a lot of our students do not get encouraged to think more critically, do not get encouraged to engage in full rational assessment of the various things they learn inside and outside the school.
If I have a motor car, I could pull off the wires to the spark plugs or smash up some other part of the engine so that it wouldn't go. I could just not accelerate. In either case, when I try to drive it it will splutter and stall. To run properly, cars need lots of care and attention. Similarly, one might argue, to think properly, to engage in full rational assessment, people need the right environment (Kleinig himself stresses this in chapter 6, pp. 75-78). In particular, they need encouragement from "significant others" and from their peers. So while you may think it is worse to wreck a car than simply not to care for it, you should agree that failure to care is a fault, and possibly a more important fault because it is so much more prevalent.
The conclusion for us would then be that while indoctrination as Kleinig describes it is a serious fault, we should not be led to ignore the much more pervasive form of miseducation which simply neglects to develop a person's capacity for full rational assessment. It is common to lament the change from the inquisitive and lively youngsters who enter school to the bored and apathetic teenagers who can hardly be forced to remain; such a deplorable falling off is not to be set at the door of indoctrination, but rather at the door of the stultifying mindless learning that occupies so much of our schooling.
Other related forms of miseducation2
Truth and the search for truth
Kleinig alludes to what is possibly a temperamental difference among people that sometimes puts them in opposition on questions of indoctrination and the cultivation of rational assessment (it connects also with the second order errors just noticed). If you think we have access to certain unquestionable truths, you may well feel that it is more important for people to come to know them than for people to be encouraged to adopt a cautious and critical stance towards all such claims. The search for something may never be successful; or its "success" may lie in discovering that there was nothing of that kind to search for. Better to give you the prize straight off, than venture everything on such a search. But in saying it is a matter of temperament, I am suggesting that there is another way of reacting to the situation, a way dramatically expressed by the eighteenth century German writer, Lessing: "if God concealed all truth in his right hand, and in his left the endless striving for truth, coupled with endless error, and said to me: Choose! I would humbly take the left and say: Father, give me; pure truth is for you alone!"
1. More severe cases of mental retardation also occur, of course. They probably constitute a general problem or exception to most of what we discuss here; I propose to leave them aside.
2. It should not escape your notice that I have restricted myself to miseducation that falls down on matters related to truth and the development of critical rationality. There may well be many other forms of miseducation that fall down on, say, respect for persons.
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URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/stepsindoct.html
© Ed Brandon, 1992, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, last revised June 21st, 2001.