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Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory pp 1–11Cite as

Habermas and the Problem of Indoctrination

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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. 1.

    The method of teaching as a criterion of indoctrination. In the US context, thanks to John Dewey, the tendency is to connect...

Keywords

  • Teaching Content
  • Strategic Action
  • Validity Claim
  • Speech Situation
  • Linguistic Interaction

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland

    Rauno Huttunen

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  1. Rauno Huttunen
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Correspondence to Rauno Huttunen .

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  1. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Michael A. Peters

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_325-1

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