Education vs Indoctrination
The difference between education and indoctrination is vast, but it is often subtle when the mind thinks of these two subjects. Education involves the seeking of facts, and learning about what is the truth, and what is not. Indoctrination is aimed at influencing people to believe in facts, without being able to back up these newfound facts with anything but opinion.
You can be indoctrinated into a political party, a cult, or a belief system. In fact, all of us are indoctrinated into a belief system as we are growing up. Whether our parents or guardians are open and understanding people, or if they are bigoted, and want nothing to do with anyone outside of their own race and affiliations, we are subtly indoctrinated into their belief system. As we grow, many of us seek education in order to develop our own belief system.
Education can be directly supported by data that is derived from facts. Indoctrination tends to use language that encompasses everything, referring to ‘all’, or ‘every’, as though the insights created are a statement of fact for each and every individual of a group. For example: ‘All democrats spend too much money.’ ‘All republicans are religiously oriented and bring the bible to work with them.’ You can’t support these statements of ‘all’ and ‘every’ without actual data. If you believe it, then it has grown from opinion to indoctrination.
Education points out that there are different solutions, often to the same problem. Indoctrination poses the belief that there is only one solution to a problem. In Nazi Germany, the solution to growing economic problems was to exterminate all minorities and Jewish citizens, as though this was the only possible solution. There was no room for any kind of secondary thought to the proposed solution.
Education uses statistical analysis to encourage thought toward reasoning, and proposed solution finding. Indoctrination often uses statistics, but has offered no analysis of size, duration, control subjects, criteria, or duration of the gathering of those statistics. Thus, the statistics offered through indoctrination are simply misrepresented, and are used only to support the beliefs being posed. Any statistics that might dispute the beliefs are not brought to attention.
Education is unbiased. It is founded in fact, and isn’t there to persuade anyone to come up with a certain belief. Education is development of one’s own beliefs based on the facts that are discovered throughout the process. Indoctrination has an agenda. It is used to encourage the embracing of another’s beliefs, and developing blinding and complete agreement with those beliefs.