Thou Shalt Not! When education becomes indoctrination (and how to

Thou Shalt Not!

When education becomes indoctrination (and how to avoid it)

By Paul Regan

Iwas only about eight years old, but I can still vividly recall the moment. I was sitting at my desk in my little South London Catholic primary school in about 1962. Our formidable Irish teacher had just finished going through the Ten Commandments yet again, demanding that after she enunciated each one of them, prompted by a rap of her feared cane on the desk, all thirty five of us should repeat them after her with sufficient volume and conviction. After repeating commandment number six, this time for me it was somehow different. Innocently, I raised my hand, and when challenged, I asked her the meaning of ‘adultery’, since it made no sense to me to be told not to commit something I had no understanding of. The response was immediate and chilling. Sent to the Headmaster’s office, I received 3 strokes of the cane on my hand and spent the rest of the day standing in the corner of the class, temporarily excommunicated. My innocent desire for an explanation had been mistaken for heresy and subversion.

I recalled this memory recently after reading that the British Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, had circulated new guidelines to teachers in state schools advising them how to avoid political (not religious) bias. A few weeks earlier, one English primary school had made the front pages after it was revealed that students had been encouraged by their teacher to write letters of complaint to the Prime Minister. The complaints, generously laced with pie charts and bar charts, were suspiciously sophisticated and biased for primary age children and a teacher plot was uncovered. In the same week, schools in another education authority run by the Green Party had been instructed to teach Critical Race Theory, a hugely controversial ideology which asserts that even young white children are guilty of unconscious race bias, and, regardless of how poor they might be, they are necessarily heirs to white privilege and power. Suddenly, indoctrination in schools was back on the political and media agenda as if it was somehow a brand new phenomenon.

Further up the education food chain, in a bizarre turning of the tables a respected academic and author, Professor Kathleen Stock, was recently hounded out of the University of Sussex by her own students after she gave a reasonably argued refutation of certain dogma around trans rights. Her offence must have been her failure to indoctrinate her students in the way they had come to expect.

Religions, politics, and ideologies come and go, but what remains constant is the desire of competing groups to fight out their proxy battles in schools. Huge assumptions, biases, prejudices, utopian fantasies, fear-mongering, unproven assertions and dodgy statistics are presented to children every day as facts and theories. Claims such as ‘The science is settled’ pepper our modern discourse and leak into the school curriculum, and are repeated ad nauseam until they cease to have any meaning. It is not so different from teaching the word ‘adultery’ to eight year olds, whist refusing to explain it. We all know that teachers, mostly without realising, indoctrinate us because we have all been subjected to it in some form during our own schooling, and then perhaps spent years trying to reeducate ourselves away from the harm it has caused us. Conversely, we can all remember the teacher who bucked the trend, helped us to think for ourselves, justified every knowledge claim with a reason, a proof or a counterclaim, and educated rather than instructed us. We regard many others of our teachers as having wasted our precious time.

Those of us who teach or have taught in international schools may

be tempted at this stage to take the high ground. Often constrained by cultural sensitivities due to locating in a host country, sometimes blessed to teach classes of students from diverse backgrounds, and armed with multiple tools for applying critical thinking, we may indulge in the fantasy that we do not indoctrinate. Our school mission statements vie with each as virtue signalers for open mindedness and tolerance; we nurture, encourage, debate, question and reflect, but we never indoctrinate. Or do we? Let us take one example.

The dominant ethical strands in many international schools are global citizenship, cosmopolitanism and international mindedness. They have been embedded in our thinking and teaching by all of the international curriculum and assessment programmes, and repeated at endless conferences, seminars, training courses and in numerous mission statements. These are noble sentiments which we expect students to imbibe, even to act out in order to satisfy their examiners. But implicit in this quasi ideology is a notion of superiority of the anywheres (those whose home is the world at large) compared with the somewheres (those who still cling to their local communities, nation states and home cultures). In his recent chapter entitled Academies for Anywheres, Nicholas Tate (2021) wrote:

‘Those who teach in international schools should reflect continually on their own perspectives and opinions in relation to ethical, political, cultural and social issues, especially controversial ones such as those dividing Anywheres and Somewheres’.

The problem with indoctrination is that we approve of it when we share the assumptions behind it and disapprove of it when we don’t. So how might we avoid the incoherence of wishing to encourage healthy scepticism and truth-seeking in our students, whilst continuing to frame for them a cognitive and moral path which depends on their accepting, even embracing, our own and our schools’ values and intuitions? The eighteenth century moral philosopher David Hume, in his work A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), gifted us two tools, which might help us. They are sometimes called Hume’s Law and Hume’s Paul Regan is education consultant to the R P Goenka International School opening in Kolkata in 2023. He was Fork. previously founding Headteacher at the United World College The in Mostar. ✉ paul_regan5@hotmail.com former is the famous is-ought gap wherein we commit a fallacy whenever we move from statements of facts to statements of values, investing empirical knowledge about the world with normative baggage. The latter maintains that only two types of statements are meaningful – relations of ideas (logic, maths, geometry for example) and statements of facts which are observable, verifiable and justifiable. So where does this lead us? I have assumed that indoctrination is something to be avoided. You might say that this is itself a bias, but Those who if asked to justify it I could do so on the grounds that both theory and practice teach in tend to confirm that students learn better international when they are encouraged to question, to enquire, to be sceptical, to problem-solve schools and to be allowed to form and justify their should reflect own conclusions. So if indoctrination is wrong or continually unhelpful, then how can we avoid it and on their own how can our students recognise it? We can start by applying Hume’s Law and perspectives Hume’s Fork to help them and us to and opinions. distinguish facts from values, and opinions from knowledge, and establish this as a paradigm. If students can spot bias in you or in their peers, try not to resent it but embrace it as a measure of your own success. Or you could look at it another way. In her book The Scout Mindset, the writer and podcaster Julia Galef distinguished between two distinct mindsets: the scout and the soldier. The scout seeks out new knowledge, is not frightened to have their views proved wrong by events and is not disoriented by ambiguity. The soldier, on the other hand, only wishes to confirm their views, normally in an echo chamber, and will try to double down even when facts point the other way. According to Galef, both mindsets have their place in decision-making but both are rooted in different emotional responses. An ability to spot the difference between scout and soldier reasoning may be a good first step toward peeling away our cognitive bases and learned prejudices, and accepting that the world is complicated. It would be exciting to share that with students, calling out soldier or scout thinking whenever it appears. Or you could try imitating the Greek philosopher, Socrates in endless conversations, he famously unraveled the assumptions and definitions of his interlocutors and led them, often against their will, to a state of confusion (aporia) which then became the basis for new knowledge and dialectic. Perhaps we need more confusion in our classes. ◆

Reference

• Tate N (2021) Academies for Anywheres in M C Hayden (ed) Interpreting

International Education. London: Routledge