INDOCTORATION OR EDUCATION

There’s lots of things that stop thinking, that is, things which prevent people from thinking in the sense of learning and discovering. I’ve mentioned a number of these ways in this series on how thinking, real thinking, is in short supply. One of the primary ways that we humans stop thinking is by indoctoration which is a substitute of real education.

To indoctorate is to take some idea (doctrine) whether a belief, a rule of conduct, a policy, a framework of understanding, an assumption, etc. and get someone to believe it and accept it so that they do not question it. In the dictionary it is also described as “to often repeat an idea or belief to someone in order to persuade them to accept it.” “The act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view.”

When we indoctorate someone we seek to get them to unthinkingly and even blindly accept an idea so that it is treated as an unquestioned given. This tends to be one of the functions of every “culture,” whether it is the family culture, business culture, or religious, ethnic, national, etc. culture. When everybody around us assumes and acts in a similar way, then it is difficult to even think an opposite thought or to question it. As a cultural given, it is then easily accepted as “the way it is.”

Education, however, is (or should be) completely different from this. Education is defined as “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.”

Education, from the Latin word educare and from ducere “to lead,” literally refers to the act of leading out. That is, you lead out of the person the discovery which then enables it to be that persons. It refers to enabling a person to bring out or train out one’s thinking, questioning, discovering, etc. in the process of learning. Going back to Socrates and Plato, the idea in education is that there is within us the knowledge or at least the capacity to know and to understand. Education draws out this capacity thereby enabling our ability for learning. More important than the specific content of what we learn is our increased ability to learn— to think, to understand, to question, to explore, etc.

Given this, the least effective way to education is to lecture. To tell someone what to think shortcuts the learning, the thinking, and the discovery process. To lecture, tell, instruct, preach, etc. is spoon-feeding people with the answers. And as noted in Neurons #7, when we get

answers, we generally stop thinking. Giving people answers will make you feel good, even powerful, knowledgeable, and in-the-know, and the answer will give people a short-term pleasure. Yet in the long run it cheats them. That’s because it undermines their learning to use their mind and discover for themselves.

This robs them from having to exercise their minds— they do not exert their brains, they do not struggle to gain clarity or to focus. Answers are to the brain what junk-food is to the body. It is sweet and delicious. Like jello, it is easy to swallow. You don’t have to chew. But without the need to chew, to tear apart, and to digest, you can’t make it your own. You can’t incorporate it into the very fabric of you.

Many people who think they are educated are actually only indoctrinated. Content information has been pumped into them which they have learned and over-learned so that they can recall it, quote it, and filter things through it. But they are not actually educated. They can present and defend a dogma, an ideology, but they cannot criticize it. They cannot think about it reflectively and they cannot bring critical thinking to it. They are “true believers” in that they are dogmatically inflexible and they cannot look at their beliefs with humor. Humor for them is sacriligious.

Recently when I presented some questions about what we were doing in Group and Team Coaching, several begged for the answers. I refused. “Figure it out,” I said. “What do you think? How will you find the answer?” Later when I was asked about it privately, I said was on strike against spoon-feeding the answers. I don’t know if that led the person to doing some personal reflecting, but at least that stopped the petitioning.

Even if you’ve been indoctorated, even by good stuff, nothing stop you from getting an education. Engage in some critical thinking— use the Meta-Model to question the assumptions you’ve been operating from, check the language your ideas are coded in, and examine the facts that you’ve been using as evidence. Step back and look at the kind and quality of thinking that you’ve been doing. It’s never too late to begin getting a true education. Adopt the attitude that Mark Twain took; he said that he “never let his schooling get in the way of his education.”