Autonomy-promoting indoctrination

Liberals tend towards the belief that indoctrination in education is problematic because it undermines autonomy. People who had beliefs forced upon them through education, while not being equipped with the cognitive tools necessary to critique these beliefs, would not become autonomous; such people, not being capable of choosing the sorts of values they wish to live in accord with, would not be the authors of their own lives. Recent literature, however, questions this view of the relationship between autonomy and indoctrination. Indoctrination may not be possible to avoid within education; we all have biases as a result of the way in which we were raised, which we may struggle to critique. I argue that rather than attempting to avoid indoctrination within education, we should instead think about how to indoctrinate in the right way . This does not mean forcing people into beliefs, but attempting to shape the child’s emotional commitments to align with beliefs which can be justified in line with their own autonomy, while still encouraging the child to be critical. In this sense, we are indoctrinating people to be autonomous.