ABSTRACT
When the first edition of this book was published in 1975 there was considerable interest in the concept of indoctrination among philosophers of education. This may have been partly because, being a notion that was on the face of it antithetical to education, it seemed a useful way to throw further light on the nature of education itself. But it was also because, in those years of Cold War and somewhat hotter engagements in places such as Korea and Vietnam, there was a genuine feeling that indoctrination and other related activities such as brain-washing were prevalent. At the time of preparing the third edition (1988), consideration was given to cutting out the chapter altogether, on the grounds that the word ‘indoctrination’ was no longer in common use and the practice perhaps not as significant as had once been thought. The first point was and remains broadly correct: newspapers no longer seem interested in lurid stories about brain-washing and people don’t seem to talk much about ‘indoctrination’ as such. Whether the second point was correct at the time is debatable. It certainly isn’t now.
