Public education, or public indoctrination, or both?
- sciart0
- Feb 18
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 19
(Both audio and transcript of interview provided)
Excerpt: "Whether over creationism or gender identity, bitter political fights have sprung up around what sorts of ideas should be taught in public schools.
Education is often touted as a tool of social mobility meant to help students access well-paying jobs, but these curricula battles indicate that many adults view it as a tool for inculcating future citizens with a particular viewpoint.
How can an institution that carries so much of our collective expectation to equalize mankind also bear some of the marks of an indoctrination factory?
Public education is largely seen as a progressive enterprise meant to provide opportunities to those who could not afford an education on their own, but its roots may have been anything but. Beginning with Prussia in the mid-1700s, Agustina looks at the curious timing of when countries invest in their education systems and finds that investment comes in response to political elites witnessing threats to their political power.
I still believe that public education, as Horace Mann put it, can be the great equalizer of the conditions of man. But after reading Agustina’s book, I’m not sure policy makers were seeking to make it so.
And troublingly, modern reformers may be more interested in indoctrination than education."
.... "So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.
So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems.
And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States.
But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs, ... uncritically."