Moving beyond rationalistic responses to the concern about indoctrination in moral education

Abstract

Indoctrination is an ongoing concern in education, especially in debates about moral education. One approach to this issue is to come up with a rational procedure that can robustly justify potential items of moral education content. I call this the ‘rationalistic justification project’. Michael Hand’s recent book, A Theory of Moral Education, is representative of this approach. My essay has three parts. First, I show that Hand’s justificatory procedure – the problem-of-sociality justification – cannot serve the purposes he has in mind; it fails on its own terms and may even cause the teacher to inadvertently slide into indoctrination. Second, I argue that the causes of this failure lie deeper than Hand’s particular approach to the rationalistic justification project; rather, it is the broader project itself that is misguided, largely due to its narrow conceptions of morality and rationality. Third, I offer an alternative way of framing the issue of indoctrination, by drawing on Aristotle’s philosophy of rhetoric. My suggested approach recontextualizes the issue of indoctrination and brings into focus a broader set of relevant features of the teaching–learning situation.

Exploration and Practice of Moral Education Courses in Universities in Big Data Era

“…At present, most schools pay more people and more resources to the cultivation of talents on students' professional achievements, and pay little attention to the problems of moral education course management. The whole process of the implementation of moral education curriculum contains several key links, such as curriculum content, curriculum structure, and the neglect of any link will affect the smooth development of the final implementation quality of moral education work [5,6]. Therefore, while enhancing the implementation quality of moral education is very important with practical significance in the practical exploration of ideological and political education in colleges [7,8].…”

Epiphany as a pragmatic response to claims of indoctrination in public schools

“…With too many to detail here, each definition provides a convincing, and slightly nuanced argument that teachers could employ in response to claims that they are indoctrinating students in our schools. Michael Hand (2017: 6) emphasizes a well-critiqued (see Zrudlo, 2021) conception of indoctrination that hinges on a rationalistic justification of teacher’s actions: ‘to indoctrinate someone is to impart beliefs to her in such a way that she comes to hold them non-rationally on some other basis than the force of relevant evidence and argument’. Ruth Wareham (2019) briefly states her outcome-oriented definition that ‘indoctrination is best described as a teaching process, pertaining to the transmission of beliefs, which directly results in an illegitimate barrier between the beliefs an individual holds and the evidence or reasons she has for holding them.’.…”