Tani Newton
No, I’m not giving up. In my previous article, I bellyached about people exchanging the meaning of the words education and indoctrination. Taking the words literally, indoctrination would be more about teaching facts, and education more about inculcating a worldview, but people use them in the opposite sense. An example of this occurs in Don Brash’s excellent article on the new compulsory Treaty of Waitangi course at Auckland University, in which he uses the word indoctrination as almost a synonym of propaganda. Well, maybe I should just accept that the meaning of words changes over time and that that’s what it means now.
But I’m still challenging the notion that there is such a thing as uninterpreted brute fact and that schools should just teach the facts. I believe in absolute truth and I believe in objective fact, but I don’t believe that I or anyone else can be neutral and unbiased. We can report facts and yet give a completely distorted view of what happened by selecting which facts to report. We can teach facts and inculcate a worldview by which facts we choose to teach. We can do those things (politicians and the media do them all the time) without appearing to be advancing any particular point of view.
I’m not saying that this is sinister. I’m just saying that we all do it and we shouldn’t try to deny it. We can all see the absurd and hopeless worldview apparent in the position that getting maths questions right is racist and discriminatory. But the opposite is also an opinion. It’s the right opinion, if you like, but it is still an opinion. Telling children that they should try to get maths questions right, for abstract philosophical reasons or for good practical reasons, teaches a worldview. The right worldview, if you like, but it’s still a worldview.
What about skills, then? Can’t schools just teach skills and techniques and leave the philosophy out of it? This is a line of argumentation that is used about all sorts of things: remember when Transcendental Meditation was all the rage and critics who suspected that it was a religion in disguise were told ‘It’s not a religion: it’s a technique’? Spinning a Buddhist prayer wheel is a technique, I suppose, and a fairly simple one. But it’s not just a technique. Nothing is. We demonstrate our deep philosophical or religious beliefs by what techniques we do and don’t practice.
Is it good and important for engineers to learn the skills and techniques of making a bridge that won’t fall down? Of course it is. But some people don’t consider it so. Some people would prefer to make a cheap bridge at exorbitant cost and then disappear under a false name before it collapses. That is their belief, their philosophy, their opinion... Your contrary opinion may be the right one, but it is still an opinion, and if you teach students how to make good bridges, you are also teaching that it is right to do so.
So stop saying that schools should ‘just teach facts’ and should ‘not indoctrinate’. You want the schools to indoctrinate children. I’m not saying that that is something vile and abhorrent. I just want you to be honest about the fact that you want the schools to teach your worldview.
