Indoctrination

Hi Bluejay, nice topic.The way I see it there are two main differences between education and indoctrination. The first line between the two is drawn in roughly the same place as the line between belief and faith, and it is drawn in the form of evidence.If you teach your kid that something is true (true in a factual sense that is, I'm not talking about beliefs or ideals here) based on your evidence based knowledge that it is true, then that is education.If you teach your kid that something is true based upon shoddy foundations, such as just wanting it to be true, or upon the writ of your favourite holy book, that is indoctrination.The second distinction that I would make is that parents have a grave responsibility to teach kids to think for themselves. I just can't stress enough how important this is. Sooner or later even the most sheltered child will grow up and start to encounter the multitude of beliefs that proliferate in society. If they are not to fall victim to the first set of appealing-yet-false ideas that they encounter, they must be equipped with the ability to think critically.Teaching your kids that your personal world view is the last word in truth is indoctrination and a fairly bad bet in general. Sooner or later they are likely to find out that you were wrong about some aspect of belief. If they have been taught that you are always right, they may lose a lot of respect for you at this point. They may well start to question everything that you taught them.A child who has been taught to think critically and accept that reasonable people may disagree however, will already know that it isn't the end of the world if Mum and Dad got a few things wrong.Unfortunately, I think that some degree of indoctrination is necessary in bringing up kids. It isn't possible to make a two year old understand the science behind combustion or the implications of burn injuries; much better to just tell them to stay away from fires and cookers. By the criteria I laid out above, this would be indoctrination, as would telling a child about Santa or the Easter Bunny, but these seem like unavoidable or harmless indoctrinations. The kind of indoctrination that I am concerned about would be the kind where kids are indoctrinated into beliefs that are going to be a factor in their adult lives, dogmatic beliefs about the world, that are not evidence-based.We are probably all guilty to some extent of indoctrinating our kids with our own beliefs. I think that it behoves us all to try and be honest with kids and avoid indoctrinating them, especially as they mature and start to question the world of their own accord. Younger kids thrive on certainty and stability and often are better served by unequivocal answers. Older kids should be offered non-evidence based beliefs as options, for them to decide the merits of. With more concrete ideas, they should be encouraged to study the evidence for themselves. "Some people think that's true, some don't; what do you think?" seems like a good attitude to me.Like Richard Dawkins, I strongly disapprove of labelling kids as "a Muslim child" or "a Christian child". I think this is ridiculous, immoral and the very essence of harmful indoctrination. Small children are just too young to make informed judgements about these matters; they should be allowed to make such judgements for themselves, as they become mature enough to handle them.

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Mutate and Survive

Actually I don't. Pay no attention to my moniker; Granny Magda is my Dungeons and Dragons character. Congratulations to you with regards to your son though. I have a feeling that the fact that you are already considering tough questions like this one bodes pretty well for your parenting skills. Absolutely. You may sincerely believe that there is a heaven, but the actual truth is that you don't really know for sure. My definition of indoctrination differs a little from Catholic Scientist's. Whilst CS defines indoctrination as taking place when you insist that your beliefs are true and unquestionable, I would say that that is only one aspect of it, after all, some beliefs are unquestionably true (such as my "fire will burn you" example). Examples like this, where obviously true beliefs are passed on to kids without any attempt to provide evidence, might be considered "weak indoctrination", which I would consider to be necessary, even desirable to an extent. Young kids can't handle uncertainty; they need simple and definite answers, which can be easily absorbed. I would include trivial indoctrinations such as Santa in this category too.I think that the really serious kind of indoctrination takes place when one passes on ones ideas to a child without as though they were unquestionable fact, when in actuality, one doesn't know if the belief in question is true or not. let's call that "strong indoctrination". I would describe your baptism example as being strong indoctrination. You don't really know whether there is a heaven in the first place, let alone what one needs to do to get there. It's all conjecture, so teaching it as though it's all definite would be indoctrination. Tough one. I would have to say that most religious beliefs are apt to become indoctrination, dogma perhaps more so than doctrine. Just asking "Do you believe that?" isn't going to prevent that. Kids learn from their parents, they are going to believe most of the things that you believe, whether you deliberately indoctrinate them or not. The important thing is that when dealing with religious issues, parents explain their beliefs to their children without giving any false sense of certainty and whilst making it clear that other people have different beliefs. Kids should know that it is OK for them to disagree with their parents. I would call both of these examples of weak indoctrination. So long as you have good reason to believe that something is true, teaching it to your kids without explaining to them the evidence occupies a grey area between indoctrination and education. The paramount concern hough is whether or not it is harmful. I don't believe that the above examples are harmful, quite the reverse. They are necessary. As a child matures, they will be capable of gradually shifting from weak indoctrination to genuine education, where they are encouraged to question everything and find their own answers. I wouldn't like to give any specific age though, since all kids learn at their own rate.What I have called strong indoctrination though, is, in my opinion, always wrong. Where there is doubt, argument and controversy, it is always wrong to present questionable beliefs as fact. Of course you should probably bear in mind that I am the kind of atheist who would like nothing better than to see religion quietly pack up it's stall and disappear. This still applies to folk like me though. If I were to teach a child that there is definitely no God, that would be indoctrination. If I were to teach a child that whilst I didn't think that there was any reason to believe in God, others did believe in him, that would be education.Bottom line, so long as you don't impose your ideas upon your kids and you teach them to think for themselves, you'll have done OK.

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Mutate and Survive

That's an understatement. I think that you and I both know that this is almost meaningless, with what little meaning it holds being wrong. That 1+1=2 is true, but it doesn't "testify of God and Jesus". If it does, I would like to know how. This is the kind of thinking that typifies indoctrination. Things testify of God if they are true and true things testify of God. Nothing of meaning is being said here. Come off it Bluejay. It makes perfect sense and you know it. You just don't want to face the implications of this observation. You feel the same as any other religious believer who is struggling with belief because you are no different to them, nor is your religion. Why fear oblivion?

quote:

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Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is. I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
- Epicurus

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The worst that non-existence after death can be like is the non-existence there was before you were born, and that wasn't so bad, was it?

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Mutate and Survive

Ah. Fair do's. Personally, I can't understand how you can acknowledge the shaky foundations of religion to this extent and still cling to it, but then, I generally find liberal religion harder to understand than fundamentalism; at least the fundies have the comfort of certainty, even if it is bogus. Well in that case you are officially fucked. If there is no self beyond the brain, then there is surely no afterlife once the brain has rotted away. Of course you are right that this sub-topic has run away with itself a bit. Back to our regularly scheduled programme... I think that the strong indoctrination employed by religions is responsible for a good deal of the refusal to accept reality that is displayed by creationists. It was recently pointed out on this forum (sorry, I forget who by) that one of the reasons why creationist are so willing to ignore or wilfully misinterpret evidence which contradicts their religious beliefs is because they already know that their beliefs are The Truth™. Nothing else could possibly contradict The Truth™, so anything that seems like it might is automatically discounted. Indoctrination is the most effective way of creating this mind set, since long held and cherished beliefs are hard to shake off, especially when they are as all-encompassing as religion. Reversing the indoctrination would essentially mean admitting to oneself that all that time invested in the belief system was wasted, not a pleasant prospect.The other problem is that if one is indoctrinated with "Belief A", there's a pretty good chance that many or all of the folks around you are pretty keen on "Belief A" as well. This forms an automatic peer group within which the belief can flourish unchallenged, since challenging the belief may lead to one being ostracised from the group. Doubting the beliefs and trying to undo the indoctrination may not seem like a good move if it means risking one's relationships with family and friends. Better to sing along with the choir, even if that pesky contradictory evidence won't go away.Another point worth mentioning with particular relevance to the EvC debate, is that the internet represents a new and insidious form of support to prop up crazy beliefs. It is very difficult to believe something that flies in the face of the evidence if one is all alone. If however, there is a website, full of other people who share your belief (and on the net, no matter how crazy you are, there are always going to be a hundred people just as crazy as you) the whole thing seems a lot more rational. After all, Net-G33k69 believes it, so why shouldn't I? This is very obvious amongst conspiracy theorists and it is also true of creationists; it is no co-incidence that the rise of the internet and the recent upsurge in creationist activity have gone hand-in-hand.Edited by Granny Magda, : Bloody typo's!

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Mutate and Survive