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No Gods ~ No Masters
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Excerpt
from my Dissertation 5.2
The
Problem of Indoctrination "For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of brainwashing under freedom to which we are subjected and which all too often we are as willing or unwitting instruments." - Noam Chomsky
If education is concerned only with the
transmission of basic skills, "factual" information and the accepted
cultural dogmas of our age, then perhaps we should indoctrinate, not
"educate" our children. The Webster's New Universal Unabridged
Dictionary (2nd ed.) defines "indoctrinate" thus: (1)"to
instruct; to teach," and (2)"to instruct in doctrines, theories,
beliefs, or principles." These definitions are not very helpful. Definition
(1) is, if not clearly false, at least an anachronism and (2) does not reveal
the pejorative connotation associated with indoctrination. Presently, we think
of indoctrination as a particular instructional technique involving the
severance of rational, reflective assessment and the logical and moral criteria
for teaching. More precisely, indoctrination entails the acceptance of
unverifiable and/or contentious premises, the acquiescence to authority and
suspension of doubt, and an acceptance of the absolute certainty of the beliefs
or doctrines with the objective of giving the "true believer" an
unshakeable faith in total solutions and ultimate objective reality. Eric Hoffer
asserts that the true believer claims
the ultimate and absolute truth is already
embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth or certitude outside it.
The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived
from his experience or observation but from holy writ... To rely on the evidence
of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason... it is the certitude of his
infallible doctrine that renders the true believer impervious to the
uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around him.
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity,
sublimity or the validity of the truth that it embodies, but how thoroughly it
insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is.[1] Although Hoffer is
referring to the doctrinaire nature of mass movements and their ideologies,
these authoritative, deceptive, non-evidential, uncritical means by which the
true believer adopts and maintains his beliefs are salient features of
indoctrination.
When one is presented with and adopts a set
of beliefs which can explain away obvious inconsistencies (e.g., "It is
God's will" , "It's an act of God", or "My astrology charts
predicted the outcome.") and maintains that experience and evidence is
irrelevant, then our beliefs become fixed and permanent. This is the essence of
dogmatism. A person who is dogmatic is one who is disposed to indoctrinate - the
indoctrinator and the dogmatist are cut from the same cloth. The dogmatic
temperament "tends to search for certainty" and dogmatism is "the
inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong"[2]
- it is the attitude that no information, evidence, argument, or experience will
ever be seriously entertained and that further inquiry has come to an end. It is
a view that sees human existence at the end of some sort of telos, a path that
has led to the necessary truth of our own system of beliefs thus disengaging the
truth of our own views and beliefs from the interplay of time and social
practice. But if history has taught us anything, it is that the world is strewn
with people who were certain and wrong.
The real problem we face is not the
rationality of most of our beliefs, but the possibility of criticizing
particular beliefs, values and institutions, particularly if we accept the
postmoderist assertion that there are no foundations, system-independent
criteria, or external frameworks on which to rest rational critique. I have
already argued against this position at some length and I do not mean to suggest
that, since there is no Archimedean point of ultimate appeal, all forms of
knowledge are on an equal footing. Important factors such as plausibility,
conceptual clarity, explanatory value, evidence, verifiability, falsifiability
and coherence are accepted means of adjudicating knowledge claims which are
generally ignored by those who maintain that Creationism is as much a science as
Evolutionary Theory and further contend that Evolution and Secular Humanism are
themselves religious dogmas. There are also those who, in spite of the paradoxes
of self-reference, argue that rationality and critical thinking are
indoctrinated dogmas. Bertrand
Russell has many times pointed out the fact that the beliefs people hold most
intensely are those that lack the most evidential support. Unfortunately, the
truth of a belief is not commensurate with the degree of passion or zeal with
which it is held. Christians and other religious persons, for example, are often
highly sensitive and defensive when their beliefs are questioned. They hold
their beliefs as though they are congruent with their very being or personhood
and any query regarding these beliefs is taken as a threat to this personhood.
The defense of these beliefs often amounts to an appeal to irrelevant external
factors, dubious premises, circuitous argument, and when they are unable to
rationally justify their position, resort to ad hominem attacks or even violence. One of the principal reasons
that religious conflicts have been so ferocious and brutal over the last several
centuries is because the adherents, generally having very little factual
evidence to use against each other, must ultimately resort to persuasion by
intimidation and violence. The assassinations of physicians at abortion clinics
by the “Right to Life” movement are a more recent case in point. As Bertrand
Russell never tired of pointing out, "the most savage controversies are
those for which there is very little evidence either way."
The
school, ideally, is an environment in which values, beliefs, and opinions can be
exposed to critical reflective scrutiny. It is a vital task of education to help
students gather evidence, assess arguments, discriminate among authorities,
construct counter-arguments, and challenge claims. But why do so many feel that
religious beliefs are sacrosanct and immune from classroom discussion? It is an
oddity and a paradox that we live in a society that shrugs off the influence of
violence, gratuitous sex, crass materialism and greed displayed daily on
television, and worries, instead, that its children will be corrupted by the
free discussion of controversial issues in the classroom. One of the
deficiencies of our educational system is that it produces graduates who are
rarely, if ever, exposed to any serious criticism of the cosmological or
teleological arguments for the existence of God and are unable to conceive of
the possibility of a secular morality. It is hard to think of any topic on which
there has been so little change in the level of its treatment in educational
institutions in the last century. With "political correctness" the
order of the day, there is clearly a taboo on open-minded inquiry at least as
strong as the resistance in Darwin's day to questioning the authority of the
Bible or the rationality of particular religious beliefs. The fear arises, I
suppose, from the fact that children will be induced to question and possibly
reject the beliefs of their parents or church. Religious fundamentalism persists
not because of inadequacies in our arguments using reason and science; it
persists because it is taboo in society - indeed, in most places in the world -
to promulgate the arguments of reason and science in refutation of most
religious beliefs (The Satanic Verses and Salman Rushdie's plight is a
case in point). I cannot remember when I last encountered a rousing refutation
of any of the thousands of preposterous religious dogmas on prime-time
television nor have I seen a disclaimer by a major newspaper regarding the
astrology column. We need to learn somewhere how to discuss sensitive issues
without taking up cudgels. These issues can
be sensitively handled in the classroom by avoiding the ad
hominem vilification and character assassination that are so common to
religious and political argumentation. It seems clear to me that if a particular
set of beliefs is so fragile that they cannot withstand intellectual examination
and critical scrutiny, they should, indeed, be rejected.
Eamon Callan[3]
asks whether parents are entitled to view their children as chattels by
indoctrinating them. This includes "the right to send one's children to
denominational schools which instill one's own faith."[4]
Callan's answer is "no", maintaining, "indoctrination is at least
prima facie the same evil whether it
is perpetuated by Big Brother or one's dear parents."[5]
The inculcation of religious doctrine is a paradigm case of indoctrination in
that the majority of the beliefs are accepted certainties and held on the basis
of faith, i.e., held non-evidentially and "immune to criticism and rational
evaluation."[6]
Harvey Siegel has argued that children should be protected from indoctrination,
regardless of its source, maintaining that it is "undemocratic and
immoral."[7]
Fundamentalist education, in fact, offers us
a classic example of indoctrination. For the aim of such education is to
inculcate a set of beliefs in such a way that students never question or inquire
into the legitimacy of those beliefs. Indeed, the mark of success of a
fundamentalist education is the student's unswerving commitment to the set of
basic beliefs inculcated, and a teacher or schoolmaster whose students did not
exhibit such a commitment could not be judged successful... It
is...disconcerting to hear leaders of the Moral Majority and allied proponents
of creationism and fundamentalism claim that parents own
their children and should be free to determine their children's education. Such
a view denies that children are morally entitled to grow into autonomous
thinkers, capable of making independent judgments as to the worth of particular
beliefs. This view is both morally repugnant in its flagrant disregard for the
rights of children as persons, and anti-American in virtue of its antidemocratic
thrust.[8]
For very young children, indoctrination of
some sort is probably unavoidable for both moral and prudential reasons.
However, the authority of the parent or teacher is probably invoked more often
to bring about acceptable behavior in a child than it is to inculcate beliefs.
Is to tell a child that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world
indoctrinary? Not if the child is encouraged to ask how or why the teacher
"knows" this. It might be argued from this example that indoctrination
is not logically bound to any particular content in the sense that a teacher
could quite conceivably convince her students that Mount Robson is the highest
mountain in the world by suppressing all counter-evidence and inquiry concerning
her claim.
It seems clear that if one is to teach, and
not indoctrinate, then as soon as a child reaches an appropriate level of
intellectual sophistication (perhaps at the Junior High School level), opposing
sides of controversial issues must be entertained and reasons provided based on
the weight of the evidence and argument for or against either side. For example,
skeptics never seem to appear on shameful television programs such as Oprah
Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera in which the proliferation of
absurdities and credulities appear endless. We would likely have no reason to
fear indoctrination or television programs such as these if we fostered in our
children the appropriate cognitive styles and intellectual dispositions such as
the propensity to question, to doubt and to ask "Why?" We cannot, as
Callan argues, undermine our children's "capacity for self-determnation"
since there "rights as adults may be violated by what happens to them as
children."[9] Appealing to the Kantian
notion of respect for persons and Joel Feinberg's notion of "anticipatory
autonomy rights," he states that we, as parents, do not have the right to
obstruct our child's future capacity for open-minded inquiry and their ability
to evaluate evidence and argument.
Richard
Dawkins, the eminent Oxford evolutionary biologist argues that young minds are
"pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate" but at
the same time find it difficult to "shut out pernicious or damaging
information." Young minds, Dawkins asserts, are "open to almost any
suggestion, vulnerable to subversion" and "friendly environments to
parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information." He likens a child's mind
to an "immune-deficient patient" which is "wide open to mental
infection" and the incoming deleterious, malignant information as a
computer virus.[10] Dawkins refers to these
infectious ideas as memes,[11]
ideational organisms generally having great psychological appeal, spreading from
one receptive mind to the next. The survival value of a meme depends upon its
ability to provide us with emotionally satisfying answers to our deepest
disturbing existential concerns and dissolve our anxiety about the injustices of
an indifferent universe. Dawkins cites "belief in the afterlife" and
"belief in a supreme being" as having high survival value, capable of
being passed on from one culture and generation to the next.
It can be argued, for example, that telling children Santa Claus is a
real person; we are not really engaging their active imagination. We are
propagating a deception, an illusion – in short, a lie. Belief in Santa Claus
is convenient and perhaps also charming and enchanting up to a point; but is
such charm and convenience worth the price of lying to one's children and
discouraging their intellectual curiosity and their respect for truth and
honesty? It is no different with critiques of organized religion. Truth is not
determined by reflections on social convenience. On the contrary, social
expediency depends upon whether a belief is true! To encourage false beliefs and
to protect them by discouraging, if not prohibiting, honest discussion and free
inquiry may well be expedient in the extreme. Those who assume some beliefs,
even if false, are necessary to preserve morality have a peculiar notion of
morality and imply that dishonesty and rigorous discrimination against honesty
are moral. However, parents who teach their children about God, the Devil,
Heaven and Hell, Angels and other metaphysical phenomena are not knowingly
deceiving their children since, in most cases, they are inclined to believe
these things themselves. The fact that children in their "preoperational
stage" of development, to use Piaget's phrase,[12]
have difficulty in differentiating between fact and fiction, we, as parents and
teachers, have a responsibility not to take advantage of their cognitive
immaturity, vulnerability, credulity, and reliance on us for accurate
information and correct undistorted descriptions of the world. Do we need these
myths and deceptions to teach children about love, good will, and the spirit of
goodness and generosity? I think not.
One of the dilemmas that humanist liberal
educators face is the conflict between their desire for a school environment
embracing a purely secular open-minded, autonomous, critical and rational
pursuit of the examined life and the freedom of the individual to, on the other
hand, choose and commit himself to what ultimately may be an unreflective life
of religious faith and unreason. As Eamon Callan has stated,
the moral problems of religious upbringing
may grow out of a radical conflict between the twin ideals of educational
liberalism. For if the examined life requires something approaching strict
fidelity to the rational-critical principle, coming to live that life would make
the option of religious practice virtually ineligible; and where that option
does more or less disappear, it is not clear that one enjoys an ampler range of
choice than the indoctrinated zealot who cannot seriously consider alternatives
to his faith.[13] Moreover, in a liberal
democracy there are serious practical and moral difficulties in any government
taking a strong paternalistic stand on the problem of indoctrination by closely
scrutinizing whether or not parents are causing irreversible harm to their
children's future ability to make autonomous rational choices. The essential
tension between religious faith and the Socratic ideal of the examined life
must, however, be "made vividly apparent to children and adolescents as
they grow in understanding, even if this obstructs parental efforts to elicit
faith in many instances."[14] As Callan has so clearly
pointed out, The experience of examining religious propositions in the often harsh light of reason will sometimes, perhaps commonly, lead to their rejection, but without that experience our children remain ignorant of the reality that confronts them in accepting or rejecting lives grounded on such propositions. Those whose faith can survive the experience will not be entirely at home in either Athens or Jerusalem, but if there is faith worth having, they are the ones who have it.[15]
References: Callan, Eamon (1988b) "Indoctrination and Parental Rights." In W. Hare & J.P. Portelli, eds., Philosophy of Education, Calgary, Alta.: Detselig, 1988, pp. 133-142. Callan, Eamon (1988a) "Faith, Worship and Reason in Religious Upbringing." Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol 2, no. 2. Dawkins, Richard (1976) The Selfish Gene. (New ed.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 Dawkins, Richard (1993) "Viruses of the Mind", Free Inquiry, Vol. 13, no 3, pp. 34-41.
Hoffer, Eric (1951) The True Believer. New York:
Time Inc., 1963.
Piaget, Jean (1965) The Moral Judgment of the Child.
New York: The Free Press. Rauch, Jonathan (1993) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Siegel, Harvey
(1984) "Response to Creationism", Educational Studies, vol. 15,
no. 4, Winter, 1984.
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