The Limits of “Indoctrination” Talk

Many recent debates about education have focused on the idea of indoctrination. The following dialectic is by now familiar: someone points to a concept, book, or topic they find objectionable and calls it “indoctrination.” Those who approve of that part of the curriculum defend it by arguing that it is, in fact, not indoctrinating students. In most cases, the debate reaches a stalemate, with both sides convinced that the other party is ideologically motivated and untrustworthy. At this point, those with the power to decide what “indoctrination” amounts to—be it school, district, state officials, or, in a few cases, even the Supreme Court—issue a verdict and enforce compliance.

A natural response to this dynamic would be to say that the parties involved are not accurately tracking indoctrination. They are merely pointing to educational content that they personally find disagreeable, distasteful, or ideologically unappealing. Indoctrination is a real phenomenon, but our political conflicts have hindered our ability to identify and criticize it.

Here is one potential solution: come up with principled (objective, neutral, unbiased, etc.) criteria to distinguish indoctrination from education. Apply the criteria to determine whether accusations of indoctrination are well-founded or merely partisan finger-pointing. This is what most philosophers wading into these debates have attempted to do.

Some philosophers have reconstructed the concept of indoctrination on the basis of proceduralist criteria, such as whether material is passed on to students in a way that circumvents their rational capacities or that prevents them from thinking critically about the subject matter at a later moment in time. The epistemic vice at the heart of indoctrination could then be diagnosed either by evaluating teachers’ intentions and methods or their results. When it comes to pedagogical methods and intentions, indoctrination might be differentiated from education by whether beliefs are inculcated “with no regard for argument or evidence.” In the outcome-based case, one way to tell whether students have been indoctrinated is to evaluate whether they hold their beliefs “close-mindedly,” meaning emotionally invested to the point of being unable or unwilling to give up the relevant beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.

Both considerations are usually grounded in the value of autonomy, understood as the capacity to form and pursue one’s own conception of the good life. If you are obstinately attached to a set of values or projects that you have not subjected to critical self-reflection, the argument goes, you are prevented from living a life that is meaningfully your own. But one-off teacher-student interactions might not provide sufficient evidence to determine whether the development of one’s capacity for autonomy is undermined. As a result, some philosophers have suggested that we should evaluate the student’s broader context, rather than just isolated incidents in the classroom. Going beyond the teacher-student relationship allows us to assess whether the “complex system of teaching” in which it is embedded is indoctrinatory.

These criteria certainly sound much better than the partisan finger-pointing. But let us see how they would work in the teaching context. Imagine a primary school classroom in which students are just learning to read, speak, and reason with one another. The walls of the classroom are adorned with various decorations and reading materials. Some of these aim to make the educational environment welcoming to students, providing comfort and giving them a sense of belonging. A classroom might feature a seemingly innocuous “In God We Trust” blazoned under an American flag. But anti-indoctrination critics could argue that bringing God into the classroom (and into public institutions more broadly) inherently privileges certain perspectives at the expense of others. What about the American flag itself? If it is an American classroom, what would be wrong with that? But a similar argument could be made along anti-indoctrination lines about nationalism in a multinational society, the politically loaded meaning of national symbols, etc. So maybe the teacher could fly other countries’ flags too? That would probably stoke the flames of the indoctrination wars even more, as the recent discussions about flying the Israeli flag in the Beverly Hills school district have shown. Critics immediately identified this as displaying problematic partisanship and political bias. The same can be said of flags that show support for a particular social group, as controversies about LGBT flags in classrooms show.

What should the classroom walls say? Is there anything that avoids the potential indoctrination objection? Maybe the teacher understandably decides to stay away from potentially divisive topics, so she puts up a sign that she deems completely inoffensive: it reads “Everyone is welcome here” and features drawings of ten raised hands with varying skin tones. A teacher in Idaho was recently reprimanded for displaying such a sign and asked to remove it. An anti-indoctrination perspective was quickly articulated, according to which the message of welcoming diversity and encouraging belonging was objectionably partisan, given the background debates about “DEI.”

Do the philosophical criteria fare any better in shedding some light on these controversies? Consider conceptions of indoctrination that focus on students’ epistemic habits. It is difficult to imagine how a teacher might go about ensuring that anything adorning the classroom walls does not circumvent students’ rational capacities or undermine their autonomy. She might not get to teach anything else if every picture, flag, or poster were an occasion for robust exposure to opposing, critical perspectives. Even if this were practically feasible, it seems in principle impossible to assess what rational argumentation would amount to for an audience of primary or secondary school students, or whether it would instill the epistemically appropriate attitudes to classroom adornments. What would it mean for second graders to be appropriately open-minded in their attachment to the country whose flag is displayed in their classroom? Or to believe that ‘all are welcome’ in the classroom without excessive emotional investment, ready to update their priors if evidence to the contrary were to surface? The very capacity for rational, open-minded, autonomous deliberation that these assessments involve is precisely what is being developed through any pedagogical action. And for those who might be tempted to opt out of decorations in the classroom altogether, leaving the walls empty is an equally value-laden decision that is likely to shape students’ sensibilities in a different direction altogether.

Consider, now, the college classroom. We fortunately do not have to worry about decorating our walls all that much. But we encounter other choice points where we must be sensitive to indoctrination concerns. A professor teaching political philosophy, for example, is faced with difficult decisions about what to include on a semester-long syllabus. She might consider the advantages and disadvantages of breadth over depth, and which authors or texts any student must step away from a political philosophy class having read or at least heard of. Will her syllabus include Marx? How much Rawls can she get away with not assigning? What about feminist thinkers? Or will it be a semester-long exploration of Plato’s Republic?

Imagine that this is the only political philosophy course a student ever takes. The decisions are momentous. The first political philosophy course I took shaped my understanding of the discipline, the questions that matter, and my own life trajectory in dramatic ways. Most importantly, they shaped me in ways that escape my rational decision-making and that certainly lie beyond anything like autonomous control. While I hopefully have outgrown my first-year college understanding of various texts and authors, I know that my perception of everything that has come since, including my re-readings and re-engagements, was both motivated and colored by those early experiences. I decided to pursue philosophy further because I was gripped by a very robust conception of the good at an impressionable age. The examined life can certainly be justified on autonomy grounds, but being impressed by Socrates probably had more to do with my decision.

The philosophical criteria might be more promising in the context of higher education, since we are dealing with students whose rational capacities are much more developed. But to anyone who has taught a college-level class, it is obvious that one semester spent with a student, often one fulfilling a general education requirement, is not enough to give them the capacity to rationally evaluate their exposure to that course material. Returning to our example, the choice of which philosophers are included on the syllabus, for example, is one that most students themselves will not be able to autonomously examine. Making a student’s belief that Rousseau and Kant are among the most important philosophers in the canon, let alone any beliefs about the merits of their theories, properly subject to rational scrutiny and justification, would likely require the student becoming a professional philosopher themselves. And even if that happens, I think it is doubtful that an individual is ever able to meet the lofty standards of autonomy that would allow us to rule out any indoctrinatory effects.

We should also consider the more promising philosophical definitions of indoctrination, in my view, which look to the complex interaction between the classroom and other educational processes in a student’s life, including the family and local communities. Assessing exposure to various kinds of information for each student would be a strenuous task. It would also be the case that some pedagogical interventions prove to be indoctrinatory for some students but not for others, depending on how their other social relations shape their beliefs and reasoning habits. But beyond any feasibility concerns, deciding whether a certain educational context has indoctrinatory effects seems to require substantive judgments. Being steeped in close-minded beliefs about the secular value of individual autonomy and liberty, for example, would probably not raise the same suspicion as close-minded devotion to a religious doctrine and set of practices. Relying on such distinctions obviously goes beyond the proceduralist spirit of the account and leaves us in the same impasse as partisan controversies.

It seems to me that the question of whether students in any of these examples were victims of indoctrination misses the mark. Embedded in the standard of indoctrination are a series of assumptions about the nature of individual agency, reason, and socialization that are either impoverished or distorting. They tend to disregard the complexity of both our rational capacities and the conditions in which they are formed. This point can be supported from a wide range of perspectives that are otherwise in conflict with each other. Whether one has an Aristotelian conception about the formation of social and political animals, a conservative understanding of the need for roots and horizons in the transmission of culture, or a critical understanding of processes of subject formation or interpellation, attempting to draw the line between education and indoctrination is wrong-headed.

Any definition of indoctrination will be overinclusive of some processes that are inevitable in the formation of students’ reasoning capacities, especially their capacity to think critically about value in their lives. Capacities for critical thinking are indeed vital, but their scaffolding and development involve nonrational processes that cannot all be subject to rational scrutiny. Such processes include everything from students speaking a particular language, being embedded in particular family practices, embodying certain disciplinary habits, and all of the affective attachments, aesthetic sensibilities, likes, and dislikes that come with socialization. A lot of what happens in a classroom, from primary school to college, falls in the category of nonrational processes. It would be absurd to subject all or even most such aspects of our given social reality to standards of autonomous justification. This would lead to an endless chain of scrutiny. Beyond justifying the decision to teach Aristotle at all, I would probably have to teach the original Greek to avoid the biases baked into any modern English translation. That then sets me up with the task of justifying using English at all in the classroom. The case could be made that this is not an autonomous choice, but the effect of the tyranny of custom or an emotional attachment that prevents us from only doing philosophy in what some (including Heidegger) have alleged is the superior language—German.

Aside from its implausible underpinnings in a certain conception of human nature and our capacities, “indoctrination” talk tries to avoid the difficult but unavoidable question of what the content of education should be. Saying that we should ultimately enable students to think for themselves, give them tools for critical reasoning, cultivate their discernment, etc., is all admirable, but it does not by itself answer the questions of what should be on the classroom walls and in the course syllabi. How should religious perspectives enter the classroom? Should education in contemporary nation-states instill some attachment to one’s own country, even some degree of patriotism? What ought to be the orientation of students towards their country’s history? How should marginalized or oppressed groups’ experiences feature in these historical narratives?

The retreat from difficult normative judgments is mirrored in philosophical debates about indoctrination, only with more erudite justifications (e.g., reasonable pluralism) that make “ethical abstinence” into a virtue. But we cannot abstain from making such judgments in education. Proceduralist philosophical standards of indoctrination can only get us so far—which is to say not far at all when it really matters. Meanwhile, in everyday political practice, “indoctrination” talk hides attempts to answer these normative questions in a definitive way without having to provide a serious defense.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.