In the early years of working with this theory I gave little attention to working out educational content or process in much detail. Having made the central educational distinctions, and having laid out the justification in terms of respect for persons, I would spend the bulk of my courses simply exploring the possibilities of indoctrination. The experience of doing this developed in me the sense that we could improve all of our lives far more radically than any of our usual dreams about education – just simply by making significant progress on reducing the indoctrination that permeate every institution.
Simply exploring the possibilities of indoctrination also has a huge effect on anyone’s educational imagination. I came to believe that nothing will advance educational understanding and sensitivity faster than studying indoctrination.
This should come as no surprise. The education/indoctrination distinction is closely analogous to the justice/injustice distinction, and indeed both sets of concepts are closely related under “respect for persons”. Imagine how impoverished our understanding of justice would be without our understanding and sensitivity to injustice.
Our sense of awareness of injustice is a considerable spur to our efforts to achieve justice. Without that sensitivity, there would be few protests. Media commentators would not be calling people to account. There would be little outrage, little anger, little sympathy – very little spur to action.
Education is like justice would probably be without the concept of injustice – a pollyanna, goody-good field full of feel-good platitudes. Sure, education can go wrong. Students can fail to learn as they should. Sure education often doesn’t live up to our expectations. But (conventional) education doesn’t really do any harm, does it? It just sometimes fails to do the good that we had hoped for it.
Even when it fails, it isn’t the education itself that is at fault – it is the family background, the poverty, too many changes of school, or just the kids themselves. There is something wrong with them. If only we could find the magic bullet to motivate them, or get around their inability/disability. Perhaps we can find some way to create a super-teacher, or some magical new technology. We just need more money, and more research. We don’t harm them – we are just failing somehow to do them good. Our intentions are noble, and we have done our best. In this way education is quite unlike justice. It is quite a peculiar things – a positive value that doesn’t have an opposite.
Indoctrination, though, is a very useful way of capturing the opposite of education. Once we identify the value that is supposed to make education valuable – the proper purpose of education (and I have sketched that briefly in the previous post) then we can use that value to identify harm. Indoctrination is the harm. It perverts, distorts, stunts, stifles or destroys the purpose of education. It abridges respect for the learner and, through learning, violates their chance of pursuing their good. In the name of education, we can quite easily indoctrinate. In the name of education we often do.
It can be found, and therefore studied, in many, many places where learning goes on, and where ideologies of various harmful kinds tend to prevail. A lot of effort, since the nineteen-sixties, went into studying these things in gender relations, race, and to a lesser extent in social class and aging. It can be studied in institutions such as the family and ideas about the family, in the workplace and in ideas about work, in sport, in business and finance, and particularly in advertising.
It can be studied in the media – including both news and entertainment – in politics and religion, in ideas about sex and love and relationships. Work for a while with ideas like success, and competition, and merit. Look at the way that power is distributed through all of these ideas and institutions, and shapes them, and consider the relationships between power, legitimate authority and justice.
Then study the critics of schooling from A.S. Neill to the present, including the huge body of serious critical history of conventional schooling, and the work in related fields, such as the sociology of education.
If, having been guided by the value of respect for persons, and having done this homework, you don’t come away with a deep sense – even in awe – of the harm that we do in the name of education, and of the need to do something about it, then I would just have to say that you have missed something. Something big.
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