Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory

Living Edition
| Editors: Michael A. Peters

Indoctrination and the Un-growth of Morality

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_419-1
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Synonyms

Indoctrination; Critical thinking; Gadamer; Habermas

Introduction

The concept of indoctrination means unethical influencing in a teaching or learning situation imposed by teacher, teaching content, or educational institution (see Snook 1972; Hare 1964; Cuypers and Haji 2006; Kilpatric 1972; Puolimatka 2001). When successful indoctrination causes infiltrating (drilling, inculcating, etc.) concepts, attitudes, beliefs, and theories into an individual’s mind by passing his or her free and critical deliberation (Huttunen 2003). When on a general level we define indoctrination in this pejorative way, it is easy to reject indoctrination. Its rejection means that we condemn the indoctrinative as teaching morally wrong and demand that teachers, parents, textbooks, or educational institutions should not endorse it. One major reason for indoctrination being reprehensible is that indoctrination prevents moral growth or it represents moral un-growth. According to Richard Mervyn Hare, the...

Keywords

Critical Thinking Communicative Action Teaching Content Communicative Teaching Mature Person 
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. 1.University of TurkuTurkuFinland