Ian asked:

Some years ago I was reading the London Evening Standardon the tube train and stumbled upon an
article on education by A.J. Ayer in which he said, "All education is indoctrination." it struck me as an
absurd thing to say then and still does. But is there more to this assertion of Ayer's than meets my
jaundiced eye? and what could it be?

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Yes it is absurd and no it is not.

It is absurd, because education is inevitable. So all can't BE MEANT as indoctrination. And what is
more, it is needed, it is the function in nature of all parents to teach their offspring to survive.

It is true, because without intending to all teachers become little gods to their pupils. They can't help
teaching their pupils things that are only tradition. That's why after some time pupils must go their own
way. Only 100% computers can be given most knowledge to survive at 'birth'. Then after that even
they must learn from experience to improve.

Henk Tuten

Two meanings of "indoctrination" are given in my dictionary, as follows:

1: to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments: TEACH

2: to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle

In meaning 1. "indoctrination" is nearly synonomous with "education" except that it has a more
confined scope than the latter since it concerns the elements of a particular subject, as in "children
are indoctrinated into the fundamentals of arithmetic."

But, in meaning 2, of course, the term to educate is very different from to indoctrinate, since
education is supposed to present students with information and ideas withoutany attempt to present
them with any partisan or sectarian opinion.

Ayer, it seems to me, was playing on these two meanings so as to get his own view about what was
actually going on in the schools as opposed to what he thought the schools should be doing. They
were indoctrinating rather than educating which was what they ought to be doing. And, so, in a way,
Ayer was, himself, indoctrinating the readers of The Evening Standardrather than educating them. Of
course, I never read the article you are referring to, so I can't know that what I say above is true.

Philosophers often use the device of saying something paradoxical in order to emphasized a
particular viewpoint on a matter. In Plato's Republicfor instance, Thrasymachus tells us "Justice is in
the interest of the stronger." Now, that is exactly what justice is not. But, by putting it that way,
Thrasymachus gives us his view of how, in fact, the notion of justice actually operates in society.

Ayer, I think was doing very much the same thing, only, of course, concerning his own, perhaps
jaundiced view of how people are educated in Britain. He might be understood as saying, "We are
supposed to be educating people, but what we are doing is indoctrinating them."

Ken Stern

Just what do you mean by the term "indoctrination"? What did Ayer mean? I haven't read the article,
but given that he is a philosopher, he must have defined that term somewhere in the paper. Did he
mean what you mean by it?

That's point one. Point two is this: you're a child learning, say, mathematics. Now, mathematics, real
mathematics, is not addition, subtraction, etc. The closest one comes to doing what mathematicians
do, while one is in school, is when one learns to do proofs in geometry. Mathematicians do proofs, for
the most part, in extremely difficult conceptual areas... and attempt to think up new things to prove.
Now. What must a child learn, and how must they learn it, in order to even get to a point where doing
mathematics is at all conceivable? They must learn arithmetic. Can they learn it by doing proofs, i.e.,
by proving, say, that 2+3 = 5? No, of course not. So they must first learn, by memory, what addition
is. Then how to add. Then facts like 2+3 = 5. And on, and on. Then at some point perhaps they will
find that they want to and have the ability to think of tentative mathematical truths, and prove them
correct or not. So the first stage is memorization of the basics.

Do you see where I'm going with this? The child is, effectively, indoctrinated with the basics of
mathematics, i.e., they must learn something, and accept it, without fully understanding it or being
able to question it. How else would you proceed? This is true for pretty much all fields, even to a
certain extent for philosophy... although that latter might possibly be the exception, if one were of a
sufficiently Socratic bent. But even there, you will find tricks in the Dialogues which amount to the
same thing. In physics, one learns about forces, vectors, electromagnetism, and so forth, without
being able to question them. In medicine... etc., etc.

However, once one gets past the point of learning the basics, then one can start to question what one
is learning; one has the tools to investigate why 2+3 = 5, and so forth. So I would agree with Ayer up
to a point. Past that point, I would not agree. The difficulty, of course, is determining how far one can
go before one starts playing with what one is learning. To read one must be "indoctrinated" with the
alphabet, with grammar, with a basic vocabulary... an then one can make up one's own words... in the
proper context. That context comes at different times for different people, depending on ability,
interest, etc... And of course there are cross-influences between some fields that enable one to
immediately question something in one if one has already learned another.

Steven Ravett Brown