Indoctrination and Social Context: A System‐based Approach to Identifying the Threat of Indoctrination and the Responsibilities of Educators
Abstract
Debates about indoctrination raise fundamental questions about the ethics of teaching. This paper presents a philosophical analysis of indoctrination, including 1) an account of what indoctrination is and why it is harmful, and 2) a framework for understanding the responsibilities of teachers and other educational actors to avoid its negative outcomes. I respond to prominent outcomes‐based accounts of indoctrination, which I argue share two limiting features—a narrow focus on the threat indoctrination poses to knowledge and on the dyadic relationship between indoctrinator and indoctrinated person. I propose a system‐based account of indoctrination in which actors with authority contribute to the production or reinforcement of closed‐mindedness, which threatens both knowledge and understanding. By taking a system‐based approach, my account is better equipped to identify the implications of indoctrination for educational policy and practice.
INTRODUCTION
Over the past century, our understanding of indoctrination has transformed considerably, from being accepted as synonymous with education to being disparaged as detrimental to students. Today, indoctrination is widely accepted as a type of bad ‘education’. In ordinary usage, the term is used to raise concern about types of teaching that are thought to harm students. For example, Glenn Beck has decried the Common Core State Standards, claiming that they will result in indoctrinating students ‘with an extreme leftist ideology’ (Beck, 2013). Richard Dawkins, in contrast, has likened religious indoctrination to ‘child abuse’ (Stone, 2013). Although indoctrination now carries a negative meaning, accounts of what it is and why it is harmful vary. Philosophers of education continue to debate these questions. At the core, efforts to understand indoctrination are exploring the boundaries of acceptable educational practices (Phillips and Siegel, 2013). They are, thus, concerned fundamentally with the ethics of teaching.
Philosophical accounts of indoctrination have proposed a variety of types of necessary conditions. Some have focused on the content taught, some on the methods used to teach, others on the intentions of the teacher, and still others on the outcome the teaching produces in the indoctrinated student. Kleinig (1982), and more recently Callan and Arena (2009), provide thorough discussions of these various types of accounts, which I will consider in more depth later. Here, I will simply note that the earlier definitions based solely on content, methods or intentions all face an important limitation—they ignore the effect of indoctrination on the indoctrinated person. Say a parent or teacher fully intends to indoctrinate a child, uses all available means to do so, but ultimately fails. Although this can certainly be called attempted indoctrination, it cannot be called a case of successful indoctrination because an indoctrinated person was not produced. Thus, any account of what indoctrination is that ignores the characteristics of the indoctrinated person is insufficient to identify indoctrination.
In response to this shortcoming, outcome‐based definitions, which define the characteristics of the indoctrinated person, have gained prominence in recent decades (Beehler, 1985; Callan, 1985; Callan and Arena, 2009; Kleinig, 1982; Siegel, 1991; Tan, 2004, 2011). Recently, Callan and Arena have described indoctrination as teaching that produces closed‐minded individuals—defined as those who are ‘unable or unwilling to give due regard to reasons that are available for revising their current beliefs’ and are invested ‘in the truth of some belief that an open mind regarding that belief would threaten’ (2009, p. 111). This kind of definition seems to fit our intuitions about indoctrination: that it involves teaching that results in students not questioning their beliefs.
Although previous outcome‐based accounts have gotten much right about indoctrination, they share two limiting features to which I will respond in this paper. First, they have focused almost exclusively on a particular type of intellectual outcome of indoctrination: the undermining of true belief and knowledge. And second, they have focused narrowly on the dyadic relationship between a single indoctrinator and indoctrinated person, ignoring the social system in which these individuals are embedded. I will argue that these two narrow aspects should be broadened to better understand indoctrination and to identify its implications for educational policy and practice. First, the limited focus on knowledge ignores the importance of broader educational aims like understanding, mirroring the narrowing of curricula and educational outcomes of interest in response to high‐stakes testing. And second, indoctrination does not occur in a social vacuum. The broader literature on indoctrination does include attention to particular social contexts, primarily ones involving religious education and military training (e.g. Britt et al., 2006; Merry, 2007; Tan, 2011). However, conceptual accounts of indoctrination have not used a social system framework as fundamental in identifying what indoctrination is. What is needed is an account of indoctrination that attends to the role of social context from the outset. Situating the teacher–student relationship within a broader social system illuminates the role of authority of both the individual teachers and other actors in indoctrination; it better equips us to understand moral responsibility for indoctrination and in turn to identify anti‐indoctrination guidelines for teachers and other actors in systems of education.
I will propose a system‐based account of indoctrination that includes a careful account of the outcome of indoctrinatory systems while recognising that indoctrination occurs within complex social systems and is not fully understood by focusing narrowly on the indoctrinator–student relationship. I will consider other possible necessary conditions for indoctrinatory systems in addition to the requisite outcome. My account of indoctrination: 1) provides an account of what it is and why it is harmful, and 2) provides a framework for understanding the responsibilities of teachers and other actors in systems of education to avoid its negative outcomes. I define indoctrination as a complex system of teaching in which actors with authority contribute to the production or reinforcement of closed‐mindedness. In the first section, I introduce the open system theory on which I draw and present a general account of teaching systems. The second section presents a case of indoctrination that I will use to illustrate the features of my account of indoctrination throughout the paper. The third section presents my account of indoctrinatory teaching systems, discussing the inputs, processes and outputs that are involved. Within these categories, I consider the various types of necessary conditions that may be required including those that philosophers have argued for previously—i.e. particular intentions, content, methods and outcomes. I argue for two necessary conditions for indoctrination: the outcome of closed‐mindedness and an asymmetry of authority. In the final section, I apply the teaching system framework to an analysis of accountability for indoctrination and conclude by discussing ethical implications for teachers and policy‐makers.
TEACHING SYSTEMS
Regardless of the definition of indoctrination they favour, philosophers generally agree that indoctrination is a particular type of bad teaching. However, they rarely provide an account of teaching in their definitions of indoctrination, and they have not situated indoctrinatory teaching within broader open educational systems. It is my view that our understanding of indoctrination will be bolstered if we incorporate a socially situated account of teaching. My aim in analysing the social context of indoctrinatory teaching is two‐fold. First, situating the teacher–student relationship within a broader system illuminates the role of authority of both the individual teachers and other actors in indoctrination. Second, this framing better equips us to understand moral responsibility for indoctrination and in turn to identify anti‐indoctrination guidelines for teachers and other actors in systems of education. In this section, I begin by discussing teaching systems in general, before moving on to discuss indoctrinatory teaching systems in particular.
Here, I will draw on systems theory to provide a framework for understanding teaching, one that applies to a vast and disparate array of social contexts and that will inform our understanding of indoctrination as a type of bad teaching. General systems theory, founded by Bertalanffy, has been applied to a wide range of domains in both science and social science. What all systems have in common—for example, both biological systems and organisational systems—is a set of interdependent parts or variables. Open system theory emphasises the interaction between the elements of the system and the external environment, in response to previous frameworks that assumed systems are isolated and unaffected by their environments. In the case of educational systems, an open system framework highlights the role of family, community and other external factors, in addition to teachers, students, textbooks, teaching methods and other internal elements of schools, classrooms or other educational systems. Thus, applying an open system framework to analysis of indoctrination provides a vehicle for looking beyond the indoctrinator–student relationship.
Open systems receive inputs that undergo processes in order to produce outputs (Hanson, 1985, pp. 131–132). The system receives information about the relationships among the inputs, processes and outputs both from internal sources and from the outside environment. This information results in feedback, which is used to modify either the inputs or processes as the cycle continues. Consider an example of a simple system: the neighbourhood children's lemonade stand. The inputs to this system include the children's knowledge of lemonade making, their marketing skills, the resources their parents provide them to buy the necessary materials and the demand for lemonade in their neighborhood. These inputs enter a process that produces an output, lemonade. Based on feedback from their customers, these young lemonade sellers may decide to change their recipe or lower their price.
In teaching systems, the elements are more complex. The inputs include teachers and students (including their knowledge, understanding, skills, past experiences with teaching and learning, and other attributes), material resources and community expectations and values. Teachers combine these inputs with particular teaching methods to try to produce certain learning outcomes in students.1 As described in a classic work by Scheffler, teaching is ‘an activity aimed at the achievement of learning’ (1973, p. 67). Thus, the output of interest in any teaching system is learning, where we understand learning broadly as the acquisition of new knowledge, understanding, skills, values, capacities and attitudes.
However, it is unclear from common usage whether teaching occurs if the teaching system fails to produce the intended student learning. Passmore (1980) responds to Scheffler by differentiating between two distinct common usages of the term teaching. In one sense, we may say that teaching only occurs when a teacher succeeds in producing learning in a student. In another sense, teaching occurs whenever a teacher simply attempts to produce learning in a student. Using teaching as a success‐term, we can understand students’ claims in an end‐of‐term evaluation that their professor did not teach them anything despite the numerous hours the professor spent lecturing. On the other hand, if we use teaching as an attempt‐term, we can understand their professor's frustration that even though she spent considerable effort teaching her students, they still did not learn anything. In both senses of the term, teaching involves an interaction between a teacher and a student (or students) in which the teacher intends to produce learning, but the outcome of this interaction varies. It may or may not succeed in producing learning. And even when it does produce learning, the learning outcome may not be the one that the teacher intended. Here, I will use teaching in the broader attempt sense which shares the requirement that the teacher intends to produce learning but accounts for the possibility that the outputs of teaching systems may not match the teachers’ intended learning outcomes.
This model recognises that teaching systems are open. Unlike closed systems, which are isolated from the outside environment, open systems are influenced by their environment. The interaction with the environment can create a complex system that does not always succeed in producing the outputs that it intends. Teaching, whether in schools or in informal settings, is highly influenced by the environment. Students and teachers bring outside experiences with them, students’ learning outcomes are influenced by their families and communities in addition to teachers, and the learning goals of teachers are in large part a product of societal and community values. Open system theory provides a framework for analysing these complex interactions. Moreover, a teaching system defined at the teacher–student level may be a subsystem within a larger educational system, as is the case in systems of formal schooling. We can define teaching as a dyadic interaction between teacher and student, but we must also acknowledge that the experiences of both teachers and students in our schools are influenced significantly by the social context in which their interactions take place and by aspects of the broader educational system, including the decisions of policy‐makers, the interpretations of policy that occur within districts and schools, and other societal factors.
When we consider teachers’ and other actors’ responsibility for indoctrination, it will become important to acknowledge that what teachers do and how what they do affects students are influenced both by the outside environment and by elements of the broader educational system. The uncertainty regarding the outputs of teaching systems reveals the crucial role of feedback in successful teaching. Teaching systems are subject to diverse outside forces, and they may change over time. As teachers and policy‐makers receive feedback on their level of success in producing desired learning, they can modify their future practices and policies.
In the remainder of the paper, I will examine indoctrination as a type of open teaching system, in which the teacher–student relationship is situated within a complex social system and student outcomes are influenced not only by teachers but also by higher level actors in systems of education and by outside factors, including their families and communities. I will use this framework to clarify the necessary conditions of indoctrination—the output of closed‐mindedness and an imbalance of authority—and to consider the moral responsibility for indoctrination of various actors in teaching systems.
THE CASE OF MR. WILSON
In order to ground my discussion of indoctrination, consider the following case. It is adapted from a wonderfully clarifying anecdote about a young teacher in Canada in the 1930s presented by Beehler (1985) in his discussion of indoctrination. My adaptation of the case presents a fictional teacher and his class in rural northwestern Georgia in the US. The case is set in 1950 and incorporates historical features of this region. I will use this case to illustrate several key aspects of my analysis of indoctrination in the discussion that follows. Although the story takes place over half a century ago, it raises serious implications for contemporary educators that I will discuss in the final section of the paper.
In 1950, a young man named Mr. Wilson finds a job as a teacher. He and his students have spent their lives in a small county in the Appalachian foothills in the corner of Georgia. The land is rocky and hard to farm and is not suitable for large‐scale agriculture. This is a coal‐mining town, a homogeneous community where slavery never took hold. Their town is isolated from the rest of the state of Georgia by a mountain. Because of this isolation, the community has always been fiercely independent. Local legend even has it that they seceded from the Union ahead of Georgia, only acknowledging their return a few years earlier on July 4, 1945. Despite their lack of direct participation in slavery, the legacy of the Confederacy is very strong.
Mr. Wilson is an avid reader who often visits the local library, and he is excited to share his enthusiasm for learning with his students. Not satisfied with simply relying on the textbooks provided by the school, he tries whenever possible to provide his students with additional information and resources. He wants to teach them the importance of seeking out multiple sources, backing up their beliefs with evidence and argument, and seeking to expand their understanding.
It comes time to teach his students about the Civil War. The available textbook presents it as The War of Northern Aggression. It discusses the rights of the States to secede, the interest of the North in exploiting Southern resources, and the duty of men to defend their homes. It avoids the role of slavery in the war. Wanting to provide a variety of resources for his students, Mr. Wilson investigates further. He sends a letter to the Georgia School Board requesting additional materials, but he receives no reply. Not to be discouraged, he finds books on slavery in the local library that seem to fill an important gap in the textbook, and he brings them in to share. They all confirm a picture of slavery as economically efficient and even beneficial to the slaves.
Still not satisfied, Mr. Wilson brings in his great‐great‐grandfather, who was a child when the war broke out and can provide his students with a first‐hand account of what life was like at the time. The old man shares stories about his father and grandfather leaving to fight for their independence, of Yankee soldiers pillaging their homes while the men were away, of the coal mine shutting down for years because General Sherman had burned down the factories of their buyers farther south.
Aware of the importance of teaching students to think critically, Mr. Wilson encourages them to ask questions, to come to their own conclusions about the war, and to support those conclusions with specific evidence and argument. If any students make unsubstantiated claims, he demands that they be more rigorous. The students respect Mr. Wilson and try to meet his expectations.
Several students entered his class already holding narrow, strong beliefs about the Civil War and the history of the South, which they acquired from their parents and community. These students have grown up in a community that views the Confederate cause as honorable. This sense of honour is fundamental to their identity. Mr. Wilson's lessons have an adverse effect on some of these students, reinforcing beliefs that are already held closed‐mindedly because of their importance to the students’ identities. These students cling to previously formed beliefs about the Civil War, and they now have additional evidence to support their views. These students leave his class not more open‐minded, but with additional evidence to shore up their pre‐existing beliefs and understandings, which as a result of Mr. Wilson's class are even less open to revision.
This case identifies a concerning educational outcome: some of Mr. Wilson's students become more closed‐minded about the Civil War as a result of his teaching. Additionally, it provides information about the limited materials Mr. Wilson uses in his teaching, about the social context in which he is teaching, about his teaching goals and about the methods he uses. I take this to be a case of indoctrination, one in which the social context plays a significant role. In the sections that follow, I will draw upon this case to illustrate the various elements of my account of indoctrination.
A SYSTEM‐BASED THEORY OF INDOCTRINATION
In what follows, I describe indoctrination as enmeshed in a particular type of teaching system. I consider each element of open systems (input, process and output) as they relate to indoctrination. In considering each of these elements, I also address whether or not the various components that philosophers have argued for previously (intentions, content, methods and outcomes) are necessary for indoctrination. My aim is to contribute to the development of a system‐based theory of indoctrination that is both more comprehensive and more resistant to criticism than its predecessors.
Output
Let us begin with the output of indoctrinatory systems.2 Indoctrination logically necessitates that someone is indoctrinated, which means that a complete account of indoctrinatory teaching systems needs to identify the requisite outcome in the indoctrinated person. In this section, I will present closed‐mindedness as the necessary outcome of indoctrination.
In the 1980s, debates about the definition of indoctrination began to focus on identifying the outcomes in the indoctrinated person (Beehler, 1985; Callan, 1985; Kleinig, 1982). Outcome‐based accounts of indoctrination have primarily focused on characterising the way in which indoctrinated persons learn to form and hold beliefs. Various candidates have been put forth including that individuals who have been indoctrinated hold beliefs non‐rationally, unshakeably or without regard for evidence. By focusing on the effect of indoctrination on beliefs and their justification, all of these definitions tie indoctrination to the intellectual good of knowledge. I will argue that this focus on true belief and knowledge leads to an incomplete conception of indoctrination. Rather indoctrination is a threat to both knowledge and understanding. By defining it in this way, the gravity of the threat posed by indoctrination is better explained, and the obligations of educators to attend to the development of their students’ knowledge and understanding is emphasised.
The narrow attention of outcome‐based accounts on knowledge and true belief does not represent our common conception of indoctrination well. Moreover, this limited philosophical focus mirrors the narrowing of curricula and educational outcomes of interest in response to high‐stakes testing. Whereas knowledge is concerned with discrete beliefs, understanding involves entire subject matters. To understand a subject, the agent must grasp its structure. In common usage, indoctrination threatens not only individual pieces of knowledge, but also understanding of subjects more broadly. Consider, for example, military boot camps, a commonly cited venue for indoctrination. Those who think that recruits are being indoctrinated are not concerned solely with how their training affects their discrete beliefs (e.g. that following orders is necessary for the safety of themselves and their comrades and for the success of the mission), but also and perhaps more fundamentally with the effects on their understanding of themselves as individual agents, of their role and the role of the military in society. Similarly, in schools, the concern that a teacher is indoctrinating students with respect to a controversial social issue, like same‐sex marriage rights or immigration rights, reflects the effect that teaching may have on students’ deeper understandings as well as discrete beliefs about these topics. Thus, we need to identify the outcome of indoctrination in a way that accounts for the threat it poses to both knowledge and understanding.
Additionally, philosophers have struggled to identify the outcome of indoctrination in a way that captures the long‐term effect on the indoctrinated person and that is consistent with common usage. The view that indoctrinated persons hold their beliefs unshakeably succeeds in identifying a significant long‐term effect, but it implies that indoctrination is permanent, that the indoctrinated persons cannot later come to change their beliefs. This implication is out of line with common conceptions of the term. Considering the relationship between indoctrination and intellectual virtues—dispositions of good inquirers—provides a productive way forward. Intellectual virtues and their related vices can be defined in relation to the intellectual goods of both knowledge and understanding, and they can identify not only the way in which agents engage in inquiry, but also the agents’ attitudes toward themselves as inquirers as well. By incorporating the latter, we can identify an outcome of indoctrination that has serious long‐term consequences but does not preclude the possibility that the indoctrinated person may overcome the effects of indoctrination over time.
Among recent outcome‐based accounts of indoctrination, Callan and Arena (2009) have forcefully defended closed‐mindedness (CM), a vice opposed to open‐mindedness (OM), as the best candidate for the outcome that indoctrination produces in the student. They also suggested that indoctrination is a threat to both knowledge and understanding (Callan and Arena, 2009). I have argued for an account of OM that builds upon this suggestion and defined OM as motivated by both knowledge and understanding (Taylor, 2013, forthcoming). Here, I build upon their account both by drawing on analysis of intellectual virtues found in virtue epistemology, by incorporating understanding more fully into the account of CM, and by clarifying the relationship between CM and indoctrinated persons’ attitudes toward themselves as inquirers. The expanded definition of CM that I propose establishes indoctrination as a threat to the way students engage in inquiry, not just to particular true beliefs. It also identifies the serious long‐term threat that indoctrination poses, while allowing for the possibility that the effects of indoctrination may be overcome. I identify the production or reinforcement of CM as the first necessary condition for indoctrination.
If indoctrination produces indoctrinated persons and indoctrinated persons have learned to be closed‐minded, we need to know what constitutes this state of mind and why it might warrant moral condemnation. CM is the vice of deficiency that opposes OM, which is an intellectual virtue. Moral virtues are dispositions of good persons, and intellectual virtues—dispositions of good inquirers—are arguably one subset of moral virtues (Baehr, 2011a). But intellectual virtues cannot contribute to the individual's moral merits if they are defined simply as cognitive faculties or skills (Baehr, 2011a). Rather, they must include dispositions that require individual agency, in particular the disposition of the individual to make choices and engage in inquiry in ways that are motivated by the pursuit of intellectual goods (Baehr, 2011a). Descriptions of intellectual virtues are varied, but OM is a commonly listed example, alongside others such as intellectual courage and conscientiousness.
The structure of intellectual virtues that meet these criteria may be formalised in various ways. In my discussion of OM and CM, I will follow the two‐tiered structure that is supported in some form by various scholars (Adler, 2004; Baehr, 2011a; Montmarquet, 1987; Zagzebski, 1996). According to this view, all intellectual virtues share a common aim involving some form of attachment to the intellectual good. In addition to this general aim, each individual intellectual virtue also has a specific motivation or characteristic psychology that identifies the way in which it contributes to the pursuit of the intellectual goods of knowledge and/or understanding. It is the specific motivation or psychological character that distinguishes one intellectual virtue from another. In addition to this two‐tiered motivational component, intellectual virtues may also require a reliable success component, which may vary in strength. Success may be an either internal or external requirement and may be required in achieving the aim of the specific or the general motivation of each virtue. Internal success may involve overcoming psychological obstacles that prevent one from achieving the aims of the virtue, such as being psychologically incapable of engaging in rational inquiry as a result of brainwashing, whereas external success may involve overcoming obstacles in the world, such as living in a community where access to accurate information is limited.
In defining what it means to have an open mind, I incorporate both motivational and internal success components of the virtue. Broadly speaking, to be open‐minded, an agent must be open to the intellectual good. She must be receptive to opportunities to improve her knowledge and understanding.
More specifically, as I argue elsewhere, the open‐minded agent is:
(1) broadly motivated to pursue truth and understanding, and (2) specifically motivated to give due regard to available evidence and argument when forming new beliefs and understandings and when maintaining or revising already established beliefs and understandings.
In order to be internally reliably successful, the agent must meet several additional conditions. To possess the open‐minded motive, the agent must be: (3) intellectually humble.
And to succeed in following through on this motive, the agent must be: (4) intellectually courageous and intellectually diligent (Taylor, forthcoming).3
All intellectual virtues are motivated by the pursuit of some element of the intellectual good, which includes truth and understanding. What distinguishes one intellectual virtue from another is the specific motivation that identifies the way in which it contributes to the pursuit of these goods. In the case of OM, the agent is motivated to give what Callan referred to as ‘due regard to available evidence and argument’ when forming and maintaining both beliefs and understandings (1985, p. 115). This motivation contributes to the general motivation to pursue truth and understanding by maintaining the agent's openness to the intellectual good in two contexts: the maintenance of her current beliefs and understandings, and her development of new ones.4
Additionally, I propose that a number of other virtues—intellectual humility, intellectual courage and intellectual diligence—are required for an agent to be reliably successful in possessing and following through on the open‐minded motive. The open‐minded agent must have an attitude toward herself as an intellectually fallible agent and be disposed both to take risks and to be persistent in pursuit of knowledge and understanding. For example, if she acknowledges that she is intellectually fallible but she nevertheless displays intellectual cowardice and is unwilling to risk opening some of her cherished beliefs and understandings to possible revision, she is not open‐minded. At the same time, if she is willing to risk considering counter‐evidence to some valued belief or understanding but does not think that she needs to do so because she fails to acknowledge her fallibility, then again she fails to be open‐minded. Therefore, this account of OM makes central the relationship to other virtues, intellectual humility, courage and diligence. It is important to note that an agent may possess the requisite elements of these virtues with regard to some domains of knowledge and understanding but not others. Accordingly, a teacher who does not have an accurate sense of his own intellectual fallibility with regard to the subject he teaches will fail to be open‐minded about that subject, though he may be open‐minded in other domains.
Given this definition of OM, we can now bring the discussion back to indoctrination. If indoctrination stifles OM with regards to some subject (e.g. religious orthodoxy, consumerism, Southern history), then it teaches students to be a particular type of bad cognitive agents, ones who are closed‐minded. From the discussion above we can define closed‐minded cognitive agents, the output of indoctrinatory teaching systems, as those who fail to possess one of the necessary components of OM. Accordingly, the closed‐minded agent is defined as one who: (1) lacks the broad motivation to pursue knowledge and understanding, and (2) lacks the specific motivation to give due regard to available evidence and argument when forming new beliefs and understandings and when maintaining or revising already established beliefs and understandings. The agent fails to possess the open‐minded motive because s/he: (3) is either intellectually arrogant or intellectually servile.
Individuals who are closed‐minded are not properly motivated to pursue intellectual goods and do not have an accurate sense of their own intellectual fallibility. Closed‐minded agents’ failure is one of either intellectual arrogance (an underestimation of their intellectual fallibility) or intellectual servility (an overestimation of their intellectual fallibility relative to others whose intellectual authority they overestimate). Both intellectual arrogance and servility undermine OM by preventing the agent from being properly motivated to give due regard to relevant information. Arrogant agents are not motivated to pay attention to evidence and argument in maintaining and revising their views because they do not recognise the room for improvement in their beliefs and understandings. Servile agents, on the other hand, lack the requisite motivation because they overestimate their fallibility and surrender responsibility for their beliefs and understandings to outside authorities. It is also possible for agents to possess the open‐minded motive but fail to follow through on it because they are either intellectually cowardly or slothful, vices opposed to intellectual courage and diligence. These failures, though, are distinct from the vice of CM. Given these features of our account of CM, educators and systems of education more broadly may contribute to CM in some subject and thus to indoctrination in a number of ways: by threatening students’ motivation to pursue knowledge and understanding about the topic in question, or by promoting or acquiescing in the development of intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility.
With these conditions on the outcome of indoctrination in hand, we can reconsider the case of Mr. Wilson and his students. As presented in the narrative, Mr. Wilson's teaching does contribute to the CM of some of his students. His teaching, combined with their backgrounds and environment, serves to reinforce a closed‐minded understanding of the Civil War. Students entered the classroom with an emotional attachment to the Confederate cause, were presented with information that confirmed a single perspective matching their own, and asked to use this information to make ‘informed’ conclusions. It seems quite plausible that these lessons will increase the intellectual arrogance of these students, undermining their OM and thus furthering their indoctrination. If this is the case, then we can conclude that Mr. Wilson's students are being indoctrinated.
If we focus exclusively on the indoctrinator–student relationship as previous accounts of indoctrination have done, then we might be tempted to accuse Mr. Wilson of indoctrinating them and to stop our analysis of the case there. The liability of the established outcome paradigm in conceptual accounts of indoctrination is that its narrow focus on the dyadic relationship that produces CM extracts that relationship from the wider system in which it is embedded and thereby obscures the question of why CM is produced in the first place and why it may warrant strong moral reproach. Teacher–student relationships—in this case the relationship between Mr. Wilson and his students—exist within broader systems, and we cannot fully understand the indoctrinator–student relationship, Mr. Wilson's obligations to his students, and the responsibilities of other actors in the broader education system without taking into account the social and educational context as well.
As presented above, a necessary condition of indoctrination is the outcome it produces in the indoctrinated person—CM with respect to the particular subject that is the focus of indoctrination. This condition identifies the output of indoctrinatory teaching systems. By situating indoctrination within the system framework, we can see that the CM that indoctrination produces need not be permanent. As teaching systems cycle over time, indoctrinated students with their closed‐minded beliefs and understandings will enter new teaching situations. Their CM may lessen or disappear. Alternatively, once they develop intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility with regard to some subjects, indoctrinated students may be more prone to develop additional closed‐minded beliefs and understandings and their CM may deepen.
By understanding indoctrination as characteristically occurring in complex teaching systems in which various elements combine to produce or reinforce CM, the outcome is still central to a system‐based theory of indoctrination and we are additionally equipped to identify the role of a wider array of actors—in addition to the individual teacher—in the production of this outcome. Returning to the case of Mr. Wilson, a limited focus on his interactions with students does not provide a satisfactory explanation of why his teaching reinforces CM. He clearly intends to foster critical reflection. It is only by scrutinising the broader social system in which he teaches—including the role of other inputs and processes in the surrounding community and the broader educational system in Georgia at the time—that we can understand the role that Mr. Wilson's lessons play in the broader indoctrinatory system in which his students’ are immersed. In the last section of the paper, I will consider the accountability of various actors in the indoctrinatory teaching system and will revisit Mr. Wilson's role in this system.
Inputs and Processes
Having identified the requisite output of indoctrinatory teaching systems, we can consider whether there are any additional necessary conditions on the inputs or processes involved in these systems. First, recall that any system of teaching involves a variety of inputs, including human and material resources and other environmental factors. These human resources include teachers and students, all of whom enter the system with a pre‐existing set of intentions, knowledge, understandings, attitudes, skills and other characteristics. Some philosophers have defined indoctrination in terms of the intentions of the teacher, claiming that indoctrination occurs whenever a teacher intends to bypass students’ reason (Snook, 1970, 1972). As argued by Callan and Arena (2009), Kleinig (1982) and Rosemont (1972), these intention‐based definitions are misguided for two reasons. First, indoctrination is possible even when it is unintended and unforeseen. And second, the intention to indoctrinate is not sufficient to produce the output of indoctrination, indoctrinated persons. In his response to Rosemont's critique on his intention‐based account of indoctrination, Snook (1973) conceded the need to identify the outcome in the indoctrinated person. Consider the case of Mr. Wilson. As described above, Mr. Wilson does not intend to indoctrinate his students. Unfortunately, his intentions are not relevant to whether or not his teaching contributes to a system that produces CM. Although a teacher who intends to indoctrinate certainly merits reproach, the intention to indoctrinate is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful indoctrination.
Other attempts to define any necessary conditions of the inputs to the indoctrinatory system, such as requiring particular content, also fail. Examples of content‐based definitions of indoctrination include arguments that any instance of teaching a ‘doctrine’ is indoctrinatory. Again, no particular type of content is necessary or sufficient to identify indoctrinatory teaching (Callan and Arena, 2009; Kleinig, 1982; White, 1967). These types of accounts are inadequate because indoctrination can involve any content. Indoctrination may occur in passing along ‘doctrines’, such as Marxism or Fundamentalist Christianity, but it is also possible for indoctrination to involve non‐doctrinal content, such as a particular view of history as in the case of Mr. Wilson. Moreover, it is possible to teach doctrines in a way that individuals remain open to considering new relevant information that they encounter and do not become closed‐minded.
Each of these possible inputs is highly variable, and they combine in unique and idiosyncratic ways in the teaching process. It is not possible to identify particular inputs that when combined with certain teaching methods will always lead to the output of indoctrination, CM. However, it is possible to observe which combinations of inputs and teaching methods lead to CM more often. Systems that contain certain inputs observed in Mr. Wilson's case—such as students who are already predisposed to form closed‐minded beliefs, materials that present a limited perspective, and a community that reinforces this perspective—may produce or reinforce CM more often than others in which students are exposed to a broader range of perspectives.
Just as no specific set of inputs to the teaching system will invariably produce CM, we cannot define any particular processes or teaching methods that are sufficient for indoctrination. The problem with a definition that rests solely on a description of methods is that methods do not always lead to the same outcomes. A specific method may sometimes result in closed‐mindedness and at other times not. As a result, efforts at methods‐based definitions tend to describe the methods involved by referring to the outcomes that they produce (Callan and Arena, 2009; Kleinig, 1982). Defining indoctrination by the methods involved does not account for the unpredictability involved in teaching due to the varying characteristics and social environments of students. Therefore, simply describing the methods involved is not sufficient to identify indoctrination. Some description of the outcome of the process is necessary, as I argued above.
Although no particular methods are sufficient for indoctrination, we can uncover one necessary characteristic of indoctrinatory teaching processes if we consider the teacher–student relationship in the context of indoctrinatory systems. As Gardner (2004) rightly pointed out, the relationship between teacher and student, indoctrinator and indoctrinated, has been neglected in the literature. I propose that in indoctrinatory teaching systems, teachers are always in positions of authority in relation to students. I begin by discussing the authority inherent in all teaching relationships, and then apply this discussion of teachers’ authority to the debate about the role of authority in indoctrination. I also go a step further and consider the possibility that the authority of other actors in indoctrinatory systems contributes to the production and reinforcement of CM.
Authority is commonly described as coming in two different varieties: intellectual authority and practical authority (Christiano, 2012; Peters, 1966; Raz, 1986; Steutel and Spiecker, 2000).5 The domain of practical authority is social conduct, and individuals possess practical authority in virtue of their social or legal positions (Peters, 1966). On the other hand, the domain of intellectual authority is knowledge and understanding. Those with intellectual authority are seen as having expertise and being able to give reasons for belief. This authority may stem from their real expertise or from the perception of expertise created by their social position.
Steutel and Spiecker (2000) have argued that educators, both within and outside formal schooling settings, possess both intellectual and practical authority.6 Recall that, by definition, to teach is necessarily to try to produce learning in others. Moreover, we tend to apply the term teacher only to those whose role is accepted as that of producing learning. Schoolteachers, professors, parents and religious leaders are teachers because their relationship with their pupils, children or followers is recognised as having the goal of producing some form of learning, the development of new knowledge and understanding. Although the students may or may not acknowledge this goal, society does. This fact about the teacher–student relationship implies that teachers always have intellectual authority in their relationships with students.
In addition to being recognised as having the authority to provide reasons for beliefs and understandings, teachers also possess authority in the sphere of conduct. In order to engage students in learning activities, teachers must have the authority to direct students’ conduct (Steutel and Spiecker, 2000). This authority is another fundamental component of the role of teacher. In other words, being recognised in the role of teacher involves more than simply being an expert in a particular field or possessing intellectual authority; it also implies a relationship with students in which one can give reasons to students to act in particular ways in order to pursue learning. Of course, teachers may or may not be successful in producing learning; they may or may not effectively use their intellectual (and practical) authority to affect the knowledge and understanding (and actions) of their students. However, regardless of their level of success, their role as a teacher is one of authority.
Now consider the role of authority in indoctrination. The relationship between intellectual authority and indoctrination is contested in the literature. Kleinig (1982) and Merry (2005) described intellectual authority as an indoctrinatory device, which may contribute to but is not necessary for indoctrination, whereas Gardner (2004) suggested that intellectual authority might always accompany indoctrination. In contrast, Hand (2002) proposed that the presence of intellectual authority might preclude indoctrination. Hand claimed that beliefs might be imparted in one of two ways: by appealing to reason or by bypassing reason. After defining indoctrination as imparting beliefs by bypassing reason, he went on to argue that religious parents may use their perceived intellectual authority to pass on religious beliefs to their children in a way that appeals to their reason. He proposed that beliefs passed on by appealing to real or perceived intellectual authority remain open to revision on the basis of new evidence or argument that children may encounter. Thus, he concluded that appealing to perceived intellectual authority enables parents to pass on these beliefs but avoid indoctrinating their children. I have argued that indoctrination is a particular type of teaching that produces or reinforces CM in students. Here, I propose that closer examination of the nature of authority and its role in teaching reveals that appealing to intellectual authority does not preclude indoctrination, but rather is a necessary element of indoctrinatory teaching systems.
If we begin by recognising that indoctrinatory teaching systems necessarily involve a teacher and student, then it is evident based on the discussion of teachers’ authority above that indoctrinators possess authority over those they indoctrinate. Because of their role as teachers, indoctrinators possess practical authority and at least perceived intellectual authority. In indoctrinatory teaching systems, teachers’ interactions with students contribute to the production and reinforcement of CM. Recall that CM, as defined earlier in the paper, may result from a failure of intellectual humility, a virtue that is closely connected to OM. A student who acquires beliefs or understandings from a teacher with intellectual authority may be more likely to develop either intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility (to fail to accurately gauge their intellectual fallibility), particularly if their recognition of the teacher's intellectual authority is strong as is the case with young children and their parents and teachers. Rather than intellectual authority preventing indoctrination or being merely a possible indoctrinatory device, it is my view that indoctrinators always possess either real or perceived intellectual authority. This condition accounts for the common assumption that responsibility for indoctrination lies with indoctrinators and not with their students. Additionally, indoctrinators possess the practical authority that comes with their positions as teachers (e.g. schoolteachers, parents, religious leaders, drill instructors). Whereas intellectual authority is fundamental to being a teacher in an indoctrinatory system, practical authority is instrumental in enabling the production of CM that is central to indoctrination. If an individual becomes closed‐minded but his CM is not the product of any teaching process in which the teacher has authority over him, then the individual has not been indoctrinated.
Now, consider not only the authority of the individual teacher, but also that of other actors in the teaching system. Intellectual authority becomes pernicious in teaching systems in which multiple sources of intellectual authority converge in support of a particular belief or understanding. Consider Mr. Wilson, his students, and their environment. The students’ beliefs about and understandings of the Civil War are influenced by Mr. Wilson because he is a teacher whom they recognise as an intellectual authority. Because the information about the war that he presents confirms the views that are dominant in their families and community, his lessons have the unintended effect of contributing to students’ intellectual arrogance and consequently their CM. Thus, by examining the teacher–student relationship within the broader system context, we arrive at a fuller understanding of the necessary role of authority in indoctrinatory teaching systems. In the next section, I will apply this system‐based theory of indoctrination to a discussion of the responsibilities of teachers and other actors to avoid indoctrinating students.
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INDOCTRINATION
Thus far, I have argued that indoctrination occurs within complex teaching systems in which actors with authority contribute to the production or reinforcement of CM in students. This analysis of indoctrination has implications for fundamental questions in the ethics of teaching. Here, I consider accountability for indoctrination and explore the obligations of teachers and other actors in educational systems to avoid indoctrinating students.7 Indoctrination harms students by contributing to their CM, a vice that threatens students’ development as inquirers and as autonomous agents. Accountability for indoctrination relies on two factors: (1) the attribution of the harm of indoctrination to the agents, and (2) the expectation that the agents should foster OM and avoid producing CM because of their social relationship to the students (Eshleman, 2014; Watson, 1996). Teachers and other agents with authority in educational systems are expected to use their authority to benefit and not to harm students; they are expected to help them develop the virtues of inquiry that will aid them in their academic careers and in their pursuit of the good life. As part of this social role, they are obligated to avoid indoctrinating students and may be held accountable when their actions contribute to the production or reinforcement of CM in students. However, because teaching systems are complex and student outcomes are influenced by a wide variety of factors, accountability for indoctrination is diffuse, and accountability at the individual level may be slight.
In Mr. Wilson's case, he takes his responsibilities as a teacher seriously and intends to benefit his students. As I have presented it, Mr. Wilson expends considerable effort trying to encourage OM. However, due to the social context and the materials available to him, his lessons inadvertently contribute to his students’ intellectual arrogance and consequently to their CM about Southern history. Given Mr. Wilson's social role and obligations to his students, we must ask whether this harm is properly attributable to him, whether he has control over the outcome and is aware that his actions might harm his students. He certainly endeavours to seek out all available resources about the Civil War and to encourage his students to consider evidence and argument. He appears unaware of the possibility that his teaching could lead to furthering his students CM. The educational system in which he is embedded along with outside factors in the community, from the local accepted wisdom regarding the Civil War to the textbooks available, combine to create a unified story. Because this story is central to the identity of the community, of which Mr. Wilson is a part, and because it seems reasonable given the absence of available contradictory evidence, Mr. Wilson was probably incapable of identifying the risk that sole reliance of these limited materials poses to his students. Due to his own ignorance, he contributes to the indoctrinatory teaching system and shares in responsibility for any resulting CM in his students.
It is important to note that Mr. Wilson's case is an example of a teacher trying to contribute to his students’ positive intellectual development but encountering challenges due to a number of factors within his own background, the local community, and the broader education system in Georgia. In the case presented, Mr. Wilson does play a role in the indoctrination of these students, due to his own ignorance of the limitations of his understanding of the subject he is teaching. However, imagine an alternative scenario in which Mr. Wilson is aware of the limitations of the local view of the Civil War and teaches alternative histories that challenge the dominant story in which his students have been immersed. His students may still resist these lessons and remain or become closed‐minded due to other forces in the broader social system, but in this scenario, Mr. Wilson would not share in responsibility for their indoctrination because his teaching is not contributing to any resulting CM. This case demonstrates the diffuse nature of societal culpability for indoctrination and the challenges of holding any one agent solely responsible for the production of CM.
We can then consider the roles of other actors in indoctrination. Given the social context in which indoctrination occurs, actors other than the individual teacher may be accountable for the harm it causes students. In formal systems of education, it is particularly important to consider the responsibility of educational leaders and policy‐makers, who like teachers are obligated to help and not harm students as they develop. In our example, Mr. Wilson is working with the resources available to him, including the approved textbooks at the time. Moreover, recall that he sent a request for additional materials to the Georgia School Board and received no reply. If members of this board received his request, were aware of materials providing other histories of the Civil War and slavery, were aware that preventing access to these materials might lead to CM, and chose not to provide them, then they are accountable for contributing to these students’ indoctrination. They could foresee that providing only limited, one‐sided materials to teachers in communities like Mr. Wilson's would contribute to CM. These school board members are part of the broader educational system, of which Mr. Wilson's classroom is one subsystem. This example illustrates that indoctrinatory teaching systems are subject to outside forces and accordingly that moral responsibility for indoctrination extends beyond the individual indoctrinator. It is not only teachers, but all actors in teaching systems, who have responsibilities to students. In order to avoid indoctrination, we need to consider educational systems holistically, rather than focusing exclusively on individual teachers.
Applying the insights drawn out of the case of Mr. Wilson, what can we say about the responsibilities of teachers and other educational actors today? First, all actors in educational systems should be aware of their responsibilities to help students develop into good inquirers and autonomous agents. Given the role of OM in both these outcomes, they should endeavour to promote OM and avoid or counter CM in their students. In addition to modeling OM, teachers should give students opportunities to develop OM by exposing them to competing perspectives in areas in which there is reasonable disagreement and by encouraging critical reflection. In subjects in which truth is known, teachers should introduce students to evidence and encourage them to reach conclusions on the basis of that evidence. Doing so requires that teachers keep up with current controversies in their fields and seek to understand their students’ backgrounds and the social context in which they are teaching, which will inform their efforts to encourage OM and counteract previous indoctrination. In other words, teachers should pay careful attention to feedback on the likelihood that various inputs and processes in the teaching system will contribute to CM. It is the teachers’ responsibility to use this feedback information to guide their conduct when teaching. Moreover, when teachers are working within a larger formal educational system, in which their knowledge, understandings, goals and access to feedback are controlled in part by other agents, obligations to avoid indoctrination extend to other actors in the system. Educational leaders should identify the types of pre‐service and in‐service training that will enable teachers to fulfill the obligations described above (which span content knowledge, teaching practices, and cultural competency). Furthermore, they are responsible for designing policies and curricula that aim at developing students’ OM.
Indoctrination threatens fundamental educational aims, including development of the motivation to engage in inquiry, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. It does so by instilling or reinforcing CM. By understanding indoctrination as occurring within complex social systems, we recognise that the responsibility to educate and not to indoctrinate extends beyond the individual teacher.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For valuable feedback on this paper, I am grateful to Eamonn Callan, David Labaree, Rob Reich, Denis Phillips, Paula McAvoy and Jake Fay. Earlier versions were presented at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference in 2012 and at the American Educational Studies Association Annual Conference in 2014. My thanks to the participants in these venues for their questions and comments. Thanks also to Tenelle Porter, Lorien Chambers Schuldt and Alexis Patterson for workshopping an early version of this paper.
NOTES
- 1 Although I refer to teachers trying to produce learning in students, this does not mean that teachers cannot also learn from students or that students do not collaborate with teachers in pursuit of learning. However, it is important to note the difference between learning from someone and being taught by someone. Instances of teaching require the intent to produce learning of some kind. I think it is reasonable to assume that teachers often learn from their students but that instances in which teachers are taught by their students are less common.
- 2 Here, I use two closely related terms, output and outcome. In the context of indoctrinatory teaching systems, the outputs of interest are students’ learning outcomes, in particular the way in which students learn to form and maintain beliefs and understandings.
- 3 For a defence of this account of open‐mindedness, see: Taylor, forthcoming.
- 4 For other accounts of OM that emphasise the formation of new beliefs in addition to the maintenance or abandonment of pre‐existing beliefs, see Hare, 1979 and Baehr, 2011b.
- 5 What I call intellectual authority has been referred to in a variety of ways in the literature. Raz, Christiano, and Steutel and Spiecker presented this distinction using the terms theoretical and practical authority. Peters referred to authority in the spheres of ‘social control’ and ‘knowledge’. The literature on indoctrination has tended to use the terms intellectual authority and epistemic authority.
- 6 According to Steutel and Spiecker, whereas formal teachers have this authority because they are recognised as having special discipline‐based knowledge and reasoning abilities, parents have theoretical authority because they are recognised as having practical wisdom.
- 7 In this paper, I focus on the accountability of the indoctrinators—actors with authority in indoctrinatory teaching systems. We could also consider the accountability of the indoctrinated person (or student). First, it is important to note that it is conceivable that individuals may become closed‐minded ‘on their own’, not through an indoctrinatory teaching system. In this case, they have not been indoctrinated, and their bear responsibility for their CM. Setting aside this type of case, the responsibility of indoctrinated persons—those who have developed CM as a result of their exposure to an indoctrinatory teaching system—is less straightforward. Considering their accountability for their own CM raises questions about the extent to which other actors have exerted power and authority over them and about the opportunities they have had to overcome this CM and become open‐minded. Take a student in Mr. Wilson's class in 1950 who has become closed‐minded in her views about Southern history through exposure to an indoctrinatory system, and compare her to a young woman from the same community who experienced similar indoctrination 65 years later in 2015. Though both have been indoctrinated, the 21st century counterpart has probably also had more opportunities to challenge her closed‐minded views through the increased exposure to diverse perspectives that are much more readily available (and hard to avoid) today. In this case, she may (over time) share more responsibility for her own CM. The responsibility of the indoctrinated person will vary depending on the context.
Number of times cited: 4
- JOHN WHITE, Indoctrination and Systems: A Reply to Rebecca Taylor, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51, 4, (760-768), (2017).
- John White, Moral education and the limits of rationality: A reply to John Tillson, Theory and Research in Education, 15, 3, (339), (2017).
- John Tillson, The problem of rational moral enlistment, Theory and Research in Education, 15, 2, (165), (2017).
- José María Ariso, Teaching Children to Ignore Alternatives is—Sometimes—Necessary: Indoctrination as a Dispensable Term, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 10.1007/s11217-018-9642-3, (2018).
