Tani Newton
This might seem petty, but it keeps niggling at me, so I just thought I’d say it.
In the endless debate over the state of the state schools, one thing we often hear said is, “What they’re doing these days isn’t education, it’s indoctrination.” I itch to ask people to define their terms. Don’t those two mean the same thing?
Of course, if you go back to the Latin roots, they are opposites. Education means drawing out someone’s latent potential, while indoctrination means fusing in doctrines or teachings.
But people use the terms to mean the reverse of that. The typical commonsense conservative ‘parent’, if such a person exists, who makes the above-mentioned complaint, actually wants the schools to indoctrinate the children – in the times tables, spelling, grammar and whatever else the conservative ‘parent’ considers important. The woke liberal teacher, who is the object of a conservative parent’s grievances, doesn’t want to indoctrinate the children. She, he, they, them, se or xe wants to allow the children’s inner giftedness to flow out, only providing a channel or conduit for it (the literal meaning of educate) to ensure that all this giftedness and self-realisation does not flow off in the wrong direction, but results in a deep knowledge that becoming a vegan and resolving to have only one child will stop the polar bears from dying.
Doctrine means a teaching and indoctrination means teaching it. Of course it has religious overtones, and I think that is the real point: the conservative objectors in this discussion are objecting to the teaching of values and ideals with which they do not agree, and they respond by implying that education should be purely about facts.
I don’t think that is possible. In reality, we cannot separate the facts from the interpretation of them. We can’t find out everything for ourselves. We rely on others to report facts to us, and the reporting will necessarily be tinged with the reporter’s bias. If I find out facts for myself, I am simply being influenced by my own bias. Even if I could perceive or report the facts in some completely objective way, that only reveals the bias on another level: Why did I want to find out these facts? Why did I consider them necessary or important?
Of course the state schools are indoctrinating people. They always have. It’s what teaching is. For a government to set up a school system and not have it inculcate the ideology they believe in would be nonsensical, if not impossible. If you agree with that ideology, you’ll call it education, and if you don’t, you’ll call it indoctrination. But you really mean the opposite.
