Indoctrination: a Challenge for Religious Education

Religious education, like many other notions common in education, has been reviewed and studied by those practitioners who approach such discussions analytically. Because of the abstract nature of religious knowledge and its doctrinal basis, some regard religious education as a process leading to indoctrination. There are still some others who hold that indoctrination is a threat to any type of education, for there would be indoctrination whenever any material is transmitted through an immoral method. The present article, having studied the distinction between education and indoctrination, has investigated two existing criteria for indoctrination: content and method. In any form of education, including that of religious knowledge, the immoral way of presenting materials would lead the process of education to indoctrination Having mentioned the standards of true education from the viewpoint of analytical philosophy, the present article has stressed that in Islamic education, the above mentioned standards have been affirmed, and theoretically speaking, Islamic education is consistent with the definition of true education presented by analytical philosophers.