Author: Ophelia Benson

A bit more on indoctrination. What is wrong with indoctrination?

Guardian readers were upset, David Shariatmadari says, by ‘the idea that a religious group should set about “indoctrinating” children who were intellectually defenceless.’ But just how damaging is this, he asks.

There are a few arguments I can think of, but I’m not completely convinced by them (as always, I’m open to persuasion). The main one is that children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of religious ideas.

No not quite – that puts it too mildly. Children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of any ideas, and that’s why adults should be very economical about imposing ideas on them. Children believe what they are told, especially when parents or authority figures are the ones doing the telling. That’s just a brute fact, as brute as the fact that children are shorter and lighter than adults. Adults should be economical in their use of superior size and strength on children, and they should be economical in their use of superior cognitive abilities on children. Adults shouldn’t exploit either advantage unless there’s a very good reason which is at least compatible with the child’s well-being.

Religious parents of course think religious ideas are crucial for the child’s well-being, so that’s a complicated issue. But churches and other religious institutions – they have other motivations for imposing their pet ideas on children, motivations which include their own continued employment and status. They are interested parties, and that means they should be very cautious indeed about ‘indoctrinating’ children who are intellectually defenseless. It’s only fair.

Still pretty clear and bright today, so I did the next item on the ‘don’t waste the ideal weather’ list and walked the golf course at Pebble Beach. It must be a closely-guarded secret that one can do this, because walkers are there in the single digits rather than the thousands. (But then there weren’t all that many people at Point Lobos, either. Carmel is always packed to the rafters while Point Lobos is blissfully underpopulated. Funny.) I encountered a guy on my dawn walk this morning, who stopped to greet the dog who was with me; the guy asked if where we were was the Pebble Beach course and I said no, it’s at the far end of 17 Mile Drive. We chatted dog for a bit and then parted, and as an afterthought I called after him, ‘You should walk the Pebble Beach course if you have time, it’s spectacular.’ He was all astonishment. ‘They let you do that?’ he said. They do. They don’t put out big signs saying YOU CAN WALK HERE but they definitely let you. ‘If I had my dog could I take him there?’ he asked. Yes. It’s funny, you’d think it would be all exclusive and get offy, but it isn’t. It costs the earth to play the course, but nothing to walk it. I’d much rather walk it!

So I did, and spectacular it was. It’s laid out on bluffs that overlook the ocean and Carmel Bay and the hills behind it. It’s an excellent walk on a very clear day in December.

David Shariatmadari is asking what is indoctrination and is it such a bad thing?

Of course, for many, the idea that anyone should spend their whole lives believing something wrong is bad. Those who are convinced of the truth of Christianity, whether they suffer or not, have been convinced of a lie, so the argument goes. But why single out religion? Lots of people believe lots of things that are probably wrong: they cleave to political and social hypotheses whose benefits are hotly contested, and sometimes impossible to test. Most of our working models of the world are based on a very fallible combination of imagination and experience, not scientific truth.

It’s not so much the spending one’s whole life believing something wrong, that I think is bad – it’s the being told things that there is no reason to believe, that I think is bad. That’s especially the case when the things are large and consequential and fundamentally arbitrary. It’s the lack of reasons more than the wrongness that I think is suspect.

Why? Why does it matter? Why do I think it matters? Because we need our ability to sort through beliefs, and detect which ones are likely to be false. We need to be able to reject unfounded truth claims. We need that for all sorts of reasons, both practical and intellectual. That means that early training in accepting reason-less truth claims delivered by authority is not useful. To the extent that indoctrination matches that description, it is not a good thing.

Well I had good luck with the travel: a big wind blew into California the night before I came down so it was crystal clear – the flyover of San Francisco was absolutely spectacular, and even the shuttle bus trip from San Jose to Monterey was beautiful. And the stars – !

The wind had died down but it was still very clear yesterday so I went to Point Lobos to take advantage of the weather while it lasted. I went to Sea Lion Point and Cypress Grove trail and then I went back on the North Shore trail, where I haven’t been before. It’s very up and down, so you keep arriving at places where you look down sheer rock faces to a cove far below with the surf thundering in. It’s very beautiful.

Hello. I haven’t disappeared – I spent most of today traveling and then a big chunk of it walking along a bit of the California coast in a strong wind and then another big chunk of it writing a piece for Comment is Free. Normal broadcasting will resume shortly.