= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
loserthree comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (1221)
Is there an amount of external modification of behavior that you'd allow as child-rearing without calling it indoctrination?
Or can you tell me precisely what you mean by that word?
Or, for that matter, the word 'society'? Aren't 'parents' enough? Does it really take a village?
It's a word that's often used negatively, but it's not necessarily bad. Embedding a doctrine into a child is a pretty necessary part of parenting, I'd say.
And it doesn't "take a village", but parents are not generally the only influences a child has - school, friends, TV, extended family, and the like all exist, and most of them do a decent job of trying to pound certain important things into kids' heads.
Thanks. I'd still like to know if and how you differentiate indoctrination from non-indocrtinary child-rearing.
It's not a topic I've given sufficient thought to to provide a well-considered answer. But at first blush, I'd say that "indoctrination" only refers to subjective things - morality, ideology, religion, and that sort. Objective things - letters, numbers, etc. - are simply education.
Hm.
I'm not quite sure in what sense a choice of language is objective but a choice of religion is subjective. They both strike me as aspects of a culture... though it is admittedly easier to raise a child without a religion at all than to raise one without a language.
Then again, I'm content to say that human parenting pretty-much-universally involves indoctrination. As does education, for that matter, although not all indoctrination is educational and not all education is indoctrination.
But you're not teaching the kid to believe in English, just how to speak it. Saying to your kid "This is what Christians believe" would be education, saying "This is what we believe" is indoctrination. It's the difference between creating knowledge and creating belief(as fuzzy as that line can be sometimes).
(nods) Similarly, you aren't saying "this is what English-speakers speak," you are saying "this is what we speak."
I'm not suggesting that indoctrinating someone in a language is the same thing as indoctrinating them in a religion, or that it's morally equivalent, or that they are equally useful, or anything of the sort. But they are both indoctrination (as well as both being education).