Introduction
Can students be trained to be excellent scientists purely, or failing that mainly, by means of indoctrination? And if not, what role, if any, should indoctrination play in science education? These are the main questions discussed in this entry. They are epistemic and pragmatic, rather than moral, in character.
Two preliminary questions are crucial to answer effectively, however. First, to what does “indoctrination” refer in the present context? Second, to what extent is indoctrination possible to avoid? In the remainder of this section, these are tackled in turn.
“Indoctrination” might conjure up images of cults using tactics such as sleep deprivation in order to seduce the vulnerable, or of a Bond villain using a brainwashing machine to acquire henchmen. But such a narrow construal of the term is unsuitable in the present entry, which is more concerned with practices and approaches that are typically legally permissible, and are sometimes employed, in contemporary...
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Rowbottom, D.P. (2016). Indoctrination and Science Education. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_39-1
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