Reason-Giving Versus Truth-Seeking: Reconceptualizing Indoctrination in Education
INTRODUCTION In the literature on indoctrination in education, indoctrination is often defined as having occurred when someone holds certain beliefs either non-evidentially or non-rationally. The emphasis in attempts to avoid indoctrination, then, is to teach students to provide reasons for their beliefs, rather than basing their views simply on unquestioned assumptions, or emotional commitments to certain beliefs. I find this notion problematic. To avoid indoctrination, we must not develop reason-givers; rather, I argue that we must develop what I shall call “truth-seekers.”
Ethical Teaching and the Social Justice Distraction
This chapter presents a conceptual argument that positions two broad areas of educational scholarship—the moral and ethical dimensions of teaching and social justice education—as being quite separate, different, and ultimately antithetical, despite contemporary trends towards merging them in both theoretical and practical ways. It argues that an emerging tendency in social justice education to position its political agenda as a moral or ethical endeavor, especially within teacher education, is problematic in that it complicates, rather than enhances, the conceptualization of teaching as moral practice; it further distracts teachers and student teachers from fully engaging with the ethical aspects of their daily professional work.
Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.