ABSTRACT
The presentation of yet another paper on indoctrination seems to call for some kind of justification. There is already a voluminous literature on the topic and the chances of saying anything new or original are slight. We do not pretend that anything we have to say is new; we can offer no fresh insights. In addition, the paper being offered furthers and encourages a tendency that there are grounds for thinking undesirable, namely, a tendency among philosophers of education to devote their attention to a certain limited number of concepts to the exclusion of batteries of concepts cognate to the concepts around which so much activity centres. In the same way that until relatively recently philosophers were obsessed with goodness or rightness in the sphere of ethics and with beauty in aesthetics, so philosophers of education are, perhaps, concentrating too much on notions such as education, indoctrination, learning and teaching. The interestingness of some recent work in Ethics and Aesthetics stems partly from the realisation that there is a whole mass of concepts in those areas other than goodness, rightness and beauty. In like manner, it might be argued that what is required in the philosophy of education is detailed work on a whole range of concepts related to those concepts referred to above. Thus, it seems to us of some importance to concentrate attention upon notions such as urbane, sophisticated, cultured, stylish, wise, adaptable, informed, perceptive, and the like, predicates which if ascribed to a person give one some inkling of his or her merit in a way that 'educated' does not. Similarly, in connection with the concept of indoctrination, what would be very useful if one wants to be clear as to the logic of the whole area would be a detailed examination of terms such as 'doctrinaire', 'bigoted', 'prejudiced', 'obsessed', 'rigid', 'inflexible', 'dogmatic', 'fixated', and so on.
