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.