the iWord

[Creepy cover image from The Manipulated Mind:
Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination by Denise Winn.]

There’s a smart and funny dad-blog across the pond (no no, the other pond — veer left and go long) at the Sydney Morning Herald called “Who’s Your Daddy.” Author Sacha Molitorisz blogged about parenting and religious issues in WYD the same week as my SMH interview about PBB.

(Okay…pulling back from the abyss of acronyms…)

How religious Sacha is himself I dunno — but with advice like this, who cares:

Both Jo and I want to give [our daughter] Edie the best education possible, and both of us want her to learn about religion and spirituality. Ultimately, we want her to make up her own mind about her beliefs, but we want her to do so from a position of knowledge, not ignorance. Ideally, we’d love her to know a little about Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and more.

The question is: Which school is going to give Edie a balanced education about the world’s religions? In fact, is there such a school? Jo went to a Catholic high school, where she learnt, predictably enough, about Catholicism. I went to a secular public school, where I learnt nothing at all about religion. Perhaps the best Jo and I can hope for, rather than a school with a comprehensive spiritual syllabus, is a school that teaches some religion, and is unbiased in its lessons.

Edie’s a lucky kid. She’s growing up with a far-better-than-average chance to think for herself when it comes to religion, since she has parents who know that broad-based religious literacy without indoctrination is an indispensible part of that.

Sacha did get me a bit tetchy with this passage:

McGowan says that in his family there are no taboo subjects when it comes to spirituality. As he says, “My goal is to keep [my kids] open and off-balance until they are old enough to start deciding on their own position”….McGowan’s position raises an irony that’s often unspoken. People such as McGowan think they’re being completely impartial and inclusive in their approach to religious instruction. But the child of an atheist is being just as indoctrinated as the child of a devoutly religious person….One dad’s atheism will probably influence his child as profoundly as another dad’s Greek Orthodoxy – and a child will ultimately either absorb that spirituality or react against it.

I’d have nodded uncontrollably at that passage if Sacha had modified a single sentence:

But the child of an atheist is at no less risk of being indoctrinated than the child of a devoutly religious person…

The difference between the two phrasings is huge. The first is unintentionally cynical. It implies that there’s just no way to raise a child without indoctrination. Yet Sacha’s description of his own plans for Edie’s religious instruction sounds remarkably free of the iWord.

His plans also sound remarkably similar to mine.

What Sacha is recognizing is the inevitability of influencing our kids. There’s no use denying that, nor would I want to. I hope to influence my kids positively by what I do and say. And I wince in recognition of the dark side of influence when my less attractive mannerisms, words, opinions, and attitudes begin surfacing in the kids. Nothing quite as horrifying as seeing yourself through the glass of your children, darkly. Likewise, there’s little as thrilling as seeing positive seeds you’ve planted — patience, empathy, gratitude, honesty — bearing lovely fruit in a moment that could have gone either way.

Influence is sometimes passive and sometimes a matter of intentional teaching. In those moments of active instruction (“Don’t throw your gum wrapper out the window!”), we try to follow up with reasons (“What if everybody did that?”) to help the kids develop independent moral judgment. The first sentence only proscribed a single act. The second invoked a universal principle that can be applied again and again. That’s influence at its best: Teach a man to fish, and all that.

My kids know — and are surely influenced by — my religious views. But I go to great lengths to counter that undue influence, keeping them off-balance while they’re young so they won’t be ossified before they can make up their adult minds:

“Dad? Did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?”

“I don’t think so. I think that’s just a made-up story so we feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara. I know she thinks it really happened. And then you can make up your own mind and even change your mind back and forth about a hundred times if you want.”

That’s influence without indoctrination.

Indoctrination is another ball of cheese entirely. Princeton’s WordNet hits it right on the head, in my humble:

INDOCTRINATION (n.) Teaching someone to accept doctrines uncritically.

Here’s one of my own:

INDOCTRINATION (n.) The pre-chewing of someone else’s intellectual food.

“Because I/God/the Pope/Scripture said so” is the frame in which indoctrination is most often hung. Non-religious parents should be less likely to parent by indoctrination, if only because they’ve seen the iWord from the outside. Yet many fall into it anyway. Silly monkeys. Take a lesson from Sacha, who has recognized the iWord from inside religion.

At the heart of indoctrination is the distrust of reason. The indoctrinator simply can’t entrust so important a thing as [insert doctrine here] to the process of independent reasoning.

But freethought parenting should have confidence in reason at its foundation. We ought to know that either reason leads to our conclusions or our conclusions ain’t worth the neurons they’re written on. Teach kids to think independently and well, then trust them to do so. And part of that education is encouraging them to resist indoctrination of all kinds — even if it’s coming from Mom and Dad.

[N.B. Wikipedia also has a very thoughtful entry on indoctrination.]