Indoctrination

Indoctrination represents a classic dilemma in the field of curriculum studies and raises the issue of whether all acts of teaching impose content, perspective, or values. In essence, indoctrination refers to both a normative belief that teachers should impose good values on students and an empirical belief that schools do in fact impose values on students. The term, however, took on specific historical significance as an ideological stance for educators from the early-to-mid 20th century who maintained that schools should serve as a tool for the reconstruction of society and should engage in the indoctrination of students.

Concerns of indoctrination have more recently justified the importance of examining programs of study to ascertain the reproduction of knowledge, social control, and the hidden curriculum.

Viewed at the most fundamental level, the selection of content for any program of study may be seen implicitly or explicitly as a gesture of indoctrination in either a benevolent sense or as an act of oppression. Such perspectives have created a contested conception of the purposes and mission of education, curriculum design, and curriculum development. Indoctrination became an idiosyncratic professional term due to a 1932 Progressive Education Association (PEA) conference presentation by George S. Counts. In “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive,” Counts challenged educators to use schools as a means to openly indoctrinate a positive social vision and to combat negative forces of society by indoctrinating students against indoctrination. This presentation along with two other speeches by Counts was published in 1932 under the title Dare the School Build a New Social Order? ushering in a social reconstructionist perspective within the PEA. The topic became most problematic when designing progressive education curricula since educators questioned whether the teaching of democratic values represented a form of indoctrination. Yet to not endorse the fostering of democracy as a purpose of schooling indicated an inability to define an adequate social philosophy sufficient for guiding action and determining the curriculum.

Indoctrination took form of “the imposition controversy” when Boyd H. Bode and John Childs published an exchange of articles in the Social Frontier between 1935 and 1938. Childs (expanding Counts's social reconstructionist position) called upon educators to develop curricula with distinct social ends. Bode maintained, however, if such social ends were predetermined and the schools became the means for their implementation, this was a form of dogmatism and authoritarianism, anathema to democracy. The spirit of free inquiry and democracy could not be embraced by schools if social ends had already been determined. Childs countered by acknowledging the fundamental biases inherent in all school settings and viewed education as implicitly and necessarily partisan. Values were already being imposed in the [Page 475]educational system, Childs maintained, and teachers were irresponsible if they did not examine and then emphasize more appropriate values. Bode objected, asserting that any imposition of values represented an abomination to democracy; he asked educators to trust democracy by maintaining faith in the general sensibilities of the common person. Bode's position did not particularly satisfy the many social reconstructionists calling for societal reform, and the ultimate demise of the PEA has been attributed, in part, to differences arising from this issue.

...