Like a lot of areas of philosophy, philosophy of education is frequently a locus for skirmishes in larger political battles. A common tactic is to accuse one’s political opponents of not really believing in education as shown by their lamentable views on school funding, school choice, sex education, evolution, or whatever. A variant of this tactic is to suggest our sides supports education—that is real, or genuine education—while the others practice indoctrination, is an ugly imposter that resembles education at first glance but which is actually something else entirely. That the word “indoctrination” is mostly doing rhetorical work in these debates is strongly suggested by how readily both sides of political divides use it against their opponents, how similarly they characterize it, and the mutual lack of charity both sides display in trying to make the charge stick. 

I think it’s time to retire the word “indoctrination” in serious discussions in philosophy of education. The real work people want to do with it can be done without it, and the word by now can not be used without its polemical connotations being in the forefront. Attempts at serious demarcations between “education” and “indoctrination” seem to me to be forever toppling over into occasions for petard hoisting or vacuity—make your definition of indoctrination broad enough to ensnare real life opponents and you’ll probably catch some allies as well; make it narrow enough to escape yourself and you end up with an empty net. 

The term also suffers from an interesting ambiguity, being used sometimes as a characterization of pedagogical techniques, and at others as a description of educational results. Initially, it seems, the focus was on the former—in the period of educational reform and experimentation that was the 1960s and 70s, traditional teaching methods were said to be indoctrinating as reformers urged more discussion based teaching, egalitarian, laxer discipline, some manner of students empowerment, and so on. What was being taught wasn’t the target so much as how. More recently however the focus is on what children are led to believe and their putative inability to question it even as adults. So, for example, secular liberals accuse religious schools of indoctrinating children by instilling religious beliefs at impressionable ages, and conservative Christians accuse public schools of cranking out unthinking progressive culture warriors. From this perspective, how children are treated on their way to there “ethically senile” status is of less concern than where they are headed. 

My suggestion is simple. We can dispense with attempts to demarcate ‘real’ education and indoctrination by outlining the demands of minimally decent teaching methods on the one hand, and the contours what it means to be minimally well educated on the other. Do this and questions of whether private religious schools are more or less prone to mistreating children than public schools, or more or less prone to produce people who display the basic characteristics of having been decently educated, become empirical matters, as surely they should. It is odd in the extreme that we could make a blanket judgment about something as diverse and complex as either religious instruction or public school education a priori, based on a conceptual distinction between education and indoctrination. And yet a surprising amount of philosophy of education attempts to do just this. 

Of course this would leave us with the task of outlining what I’ve called minimally decent teaching on the one hand—what are the minimal moral expectations schools should face when it comes to how it treats its students—and minimally decent educational outcomes on the other. Even finding a framework for working through these questions in societies marked by extensive moral and religious pluralism is a challenge. Kind of sounds like a research project.