What’s Wrong with Teaching Controversial Issues Directively?

Abstract How should controversial issues be taught in schools? In the philosophy of education, this question is often answered along the following lines: if a topic is controversial, it should be taught non-directively. A common justification for this idea is that other ways of teaching controversial issues would simply amount to indoctrination. In this paper, I would like to critically discuss this idea in more detail. More specifically, I will argue that a general categorization of directive approaches to teaching controversial issues as indoctrinatory is not as convincing as one might initially think. Against this background, I will then develop an alternative explanation for the pedagogical illegitimacy of directive approaches to teaching controversial issues. The basic idea behind this explanation is that such approaches undermine an important educational goal of teaching controversial issues by depriving students of the opportunity to arrive at well-formed judgments on these issues.