The Problem of the Criteria of Indoctrination
In the philosophy of education, the concept of indoctrination refers to unethical influencing in a teaching situation. Indoctrination means infiltrating (drilling, inculcating, etc.) concepts, attitudes, beliefs, and theories into a student’s mind by passing her free and critical deliberation. When – on a general level – we define indoctrination in this way, it is easy to say that the indoctrinative teaching is morally wrong and that teachers or educational institutions should not practice it. The problem is how do we acknowledge indoctrinative teaching? By what criterion do we consider teaching to be a form of indoctrination or to have elements of indoctrination?
The educational philosopher Ivan Snook has divided criteria that have been used in educational literature into four classes (Snook 1972, pp. 16–67):
- 1.
The method of teaching as a criterion of indoctrination. In the US context, thanks to John Dewey, the tendency is to connect...
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Huttunen, R. (2016). Habermas and the Problem of Indoctrination. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_325-1
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