Sugata Mitra’s Doctrine of “Outdoctrination”
According to Professor Sugata Mitra, outdoctrination is what should counteract the dreaded indoctrination. It involves what Sugata Mitra calls a “minimally invasive” form of education. A school (it could be an old-fashioned maximally invasive school) sets aside some space and time for a “self-organising learning environment” (SOLE). The crucial tools in the room are PCs connected to the internet – enough PCs for the students to use them in small groups. The students are given the freedom to surf the web to pursue their educational interests. The outdoctrination then occurs when students find information and opinions or value judgments that conflict with those they have acquired during their earlier indoctrination. Inevitably doubts emerge about the truth of what they had previously been led to believe, and so the liberating process of outdoctrination begins.
Isn’t this great? Surely it is a good idea if the old dogmatic systems are loosened up. I agree, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see a reversion to a system where students are frog-marched around the yard at the start of the school day, then lined up in front of the national flag to sing the national anthem before being taught a historical narrative according to which their ancestors are always the good guys and the enemies are always ignorant brutes. Sugata Mitra’s approach is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. In short it is too half-hearted. If we really think indoctrination should be challenged, something more is needed.
Part of the problem with outdoctrination is that the end result, as far as the mentality of the students is concerned, is likely to be a sort of soft semi-nihilism – a quiet confusion about values (assuming the students don’t come across some sect or other online and decide that it has grasped the Absolute Truth, signing up for a maximally invasive course in scientology, for instance).
The outcome is likely to bear a striking resemblance to that of the maximally invasive multicultural education we have had in Europe for a few decades now. Multiculturalism meant tolerance, and that was cultivated by doing a few lessons about one dogma, then a few more about another, then another, and so on until it became obvious to the students that there were numerous names for the Supreme Being, with no way of deciding which was right and which was wrong. Tolerance might be gained, but at the expense of a firm belief in anything in particular – a quiet, liberal semi-nihilism.
What’s the alternative? To see what this might be, we need to think a little more about why we became interested in outdoctrination in the first place. Why do we think it is a good thing if the old dogmatic ways are slowly undermined? This is something educationalists need to debate, but let me suggest two main reasons to get the ball rolling.
One reason has to do with the value of individuality. We want all young people to have the right to develop fully as individuals, and in school that has to involve students beginning to take some control of their education. Hence the importance of students questioning received wisdom, and also participating in the organisation of their learning environment.
The other reason has to do with epistemology (our understanding of what can be said to be true). Part of our reluctance to carry on imposing the old dogmas is that we no longer believe that they have any Absolute Truth. This might be called a post-modernist epistemology – the sort of social self-understanding expressed so well by Nietzsche when he described all our ideological frameworks as “human, all too human.” In other words, we have the profound understanding that whenever we make a claim to know something, we always rely on a conceptual framework that is the product of an all-too-human history. If we climb to the top of a mountain and find something carved in stone, we will only be able to know what it says if we can translate it into our language and understand it in terms of things that are familiar to us. At the same time, we realise that there is no way to step outside of this conceptual framework to somehow judge whether it corresponds to the Supreme Being that might lie beyond it.
The alternative to outdoctrination then involves seeing that this concern with individuality and this new epistemology belong to a cluster of very specific historical traditions. If we are serious about those values, then we ought to be serious about those traditions. They don’t boil down to a single dogma. On the contrary, they comprise a history of emerging ideas about dogma, truth, humanity, history, society and individuality. It is a history that we can identify with and believe in so that we no longer feel that we are lost in the no-man’s land in some apparently senseless war of ideas.
If this is the history that makes sense of our concerns about child-centredness and anti-dogmatism, surely there is a good reason here for introducing students to it, instead of just sitting in the corridor outside the self-organising learning environment with crossed fingers hoping that the students will somehow find the relevant web pages among the billions listed by the search engines. How can we possibly believe it is right to create a situation in which the children’s acquired dogmas will be undermined, without helping them understand why it makes sense to move beyond dogma? How can we believe that we have done our job as educationalists if the end result for the students is confusion rather than understanding?
But let’s assume that one group of students manages to drag themselves away from the website where they can cartoonify photos of themselves, and, quite by chance, they find an online copy of Descartes’ “Discourse on Method” (one of the key texts marking the beginning of the modern intellectual epoch – available for free download on gutenberg.org). Here is the man who said that henceforth all knowledge must begin from doubt. What a great way to begin to understand how we came to bid adieu to dogmatism. But the book (written in 1637) isn’t exactly an easy read. The students are going to find it tough going. It will also not be easy to find good secondary texts online that connect what Descartes had to say in northern Europe in the early 17th century with what the children believe now. The chances are that the struggling students will go out into the hallway (where we are sitting so as not to be invasive) and ask us for help. That help is called teaching. Let’s teach (in a non-dogmatic way) the tradition that has given us our current understanding of truth, our aversion to dogmatism and our concern for the freedom of the individual. If we are serious about the need to undermine dogma, then let’s organise its undermining. Let’s organise class discussions about the issues of belief, tradition, religion, truth and individuality. And when the students seem ready and willing to learn more about how we came to be anti-dogma and pro-individual, let’s point them in the right direction and help them make sense of the tradition.
I use SOLE in my class everyday. The questions are developing in tone and texture. The research is growing from simple copy and paste to more detailed and insightful answers. The presentation portion has made my students stronger because they must face a jury of their peers, who may not show mercy at inept research or shoddy explanations. They also must face a critique of their style of presentation. The discussions after are priceless in that they allow the students to draw out thoughts and ideas to be further explored. I can see where different modifications of Mitra’s methods are necessary depending on the subject being taught. Having used it in Language Arts, Social Studies, Science and Health I feel it is quite adaptable, if one wants it to be. The main issue is that many of my peers are not flexible themselves to recognize what will happen, if you let the kids work with it.
Bill, Looking at your kidsgotsole.com website it is interesting to see how easily the Mitra SOLE idea can be dovetailed into a sales campaign for Google. Getting the kids to join up in the playground so that their linked bodies form the word “Google” has some lovely North Korean echoes. Liberation pedagogy at its best, Bill. Good luck with the revenue stream.
The Google logo was their idea, not Google’s. So nice of you to take away something negative from their creativity.
I share your concern to help students tread a path between indoctrination on the one hand and relativism on the other. I strongly agree with your proposal to facilitate class discussions about truth, individuality, tradition and so on. By enquiring into these concepts in a collaborative way, students learn to think critically about the reasons for their beliefs and the quality of their reasons, and so become less susceptible to dogmatic and relativistic beliefs.
You might be interested to read my own critique of Dr Mitra’s educational approach in my post entitled ‘Can you kill a goat by staring at it? A critical look at minimally invasive education’, which has just been published as a guest post on the Philosophy Foundation’s blog at http://philosophyfoundation.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/
Thanks, Michelle, for the comment. We have had a look at your site and are impressed with the work you are doing with philosophy for children. Our own feeling on that matter is that it is a crime against humanity that philosophy is not at the core of the secondary school curriculum in countries like the UK. If we had the funds, we would push for Michael Gove to be brought before the court in the Hague.
There is no future for humanity unless our culture takes a quantum leap in thoughtfulness. Philosophy is not necessarily the solution, but it can help us understand the problem.
“There is no future for humanity unless our culture takes a quantum leap in thoughtfulness. Philosophy is not necessarily the solution, but it can help us understand the problem.”
Completely agree. I wish I had been exposed to world philosophies from Kindergarten! Unfortunately for me it wasn’t until high school that we sort of got a little superficial exposure, and as my comment below relays, I had to do the in depth study on my own after school hours. I’m so glad I did. South Asian philosophies changed my life for the better.
“The outcome is likely to bear a striking resemblance to that of the maximally invasive multicultural education we have had in Europe for a few decades now. Multiculturalism meant tolerance, and that was cultivated by doing a few lessons about one dogma, then a few more about another, then another, and so on until it became obvious to the students that there were numerous names for the Supreme Being, with no way of deciding which was right and which was wrong. Tolerance might be gained, but at the expense of a firm belief in anything in particular – a quiet, liberal semi-nihilism.”
This was the exact opposite of my experience. Due to learning about various world cultures, philosophies and religions, my interest was sparked. I then went on to do my own more in depth research of a few that struck me as particularly poignant and pertinent on my own time. After I graduated this interest took me traveling to the country of origin of the philosophical systems I was most inspired by and I have since converted and ex-patted and been a long time practitioner with very clear ideas about ethics, morality, values, right/wrong, etc.
Now I’m back in my country of origin (the USA) and sharing the gift of this wisdom with others and am being very warmly received.
Had I not had that original exposure, would I be so content, happy and with a well formulated ethics and values system as I find myself today? Who knows. But I am humbly grateful for the initial exposure to world religions in my classroom.
Dear Krishna Consciousness, Thanks for the comment. Let me clarify the criticism of multi-cultural education. We are not against the exposure of children to the widest possible array of religions, ideologies, dogmas and world views. We rely on the point made in our post about Hannah Arendt’s approach to education: The core of the curriculum ought to involve introducing students to the cultural world they live in and its long history. Any serious introduction to life in the West has to include an acknowledgement that the East has exerted from time to time. So the study of the East should include the question: Why the East? What was the lack in the West that made the East seem attractive?
Education needs to be Delphic in this sense; we need to develop a deeper understanding of ourselves, and that will also be the West’s understanding of itself. Yes, often we understand ourselves through the other, and the West can develop a better understanding of itself through its contact with the East. The point though surely is not to abandon our heritage, but to learn from others in order to find a better way forward for the particular cultural world we find ourselves in.
You returned to the West. For one reason or another you could not entirely deny your heritage and lose yourself in an Asian society. We have also moved east (not so far, but still east) but our concern remains with the West that we are (and we can’t shake off our westernness) and with how things might be moved forward differently from the disturbing direction in which they are heading.
The big problem with shallow multi-culturalism as we see it is the absence of history. Everything at school needs to be understood in its historical context. There should be no science lessons without the history of science, for instance. The best course in the history of culture (civilisation) would centre on the questions of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. Simply giving kids tasters of other religions does nothing of the sort (although in rare cases – yours included – it might be enough to spark a greater thoughtfulness about the most important questions).
Its not a matter of East vs West. That’s a false dichotomy, especially if you consider history, as you mention, and how much of the West’s medical and other sciences and arts, including philosophy, are based upon and expanded from South Asian discoveries and research from long ago. It wasn’t just silk and curry that was traded along the Silk and Spice Routes.
Philosophy is universal. The principles of my particular school of philosophy are globally applicable. That is why no matter where in the world I go I see reality reflected in this philosophy and no matter where I go, people shake their heads “yeah” whenever I share it with them. Truth is truth in any language.
We too are against false dichotomies, but we are not against differences. You were attracted by something that was radically different from the American. That difference is all we are referring to, not a false dichotomy.
“Truth is truth in any language.” No, it isn’t. Even in English it is massively difficult for people to agree on what the truth is. Christ said (translating the biblical Greek into English): “I am the truth.” That is a meaningless proposition to the scientists of the West. Another example, this time from philosophy: Heidegger has a difficult essay on the ancient Greek concept of truth as “aletheia”, arguing that the Greeks grasped something essential about truth that we in the West have since forgotten. Or: the logical positivists arguing that there is a truth about facts but none about values, i.e. about the highest issues, which we are supposed to pass over in silence. And they are assuming that the truth must be identical with its impersonal propositional expression, which is surely not what your spiritual masters in Asia were saying.
“the logical positivists arguing that there is a truth about facts but none about values”
There is truth about facts, about which we all can emperically agree, provided that truth about facts is presented in a factual way. Now the values – well, values are based on facts are they not? Meaning values are a reaction to facts. So the differences arise in the various reactions to facts.
But anyway, “You were attracted by something that was radically different from the American.”
True.
But that’s not to say that “the American” is entirely unattractive in every aspect, though that certainly can be, and is being, argued by some. Americans have the capability of understanding the facts of the world via western philosophy but that same philosophy offers no mechanism by which they can transcend that which they’ve come to understand. Hence all the depression, anger, and lack of contentment over here. I do what I can to help.
I consider myself an internationalist or third culture person in spirit.
“We too are against false dichotomies, but we are not against differences. You were attracted by something that was radically different from the American. That difference is all we are referring to, not a false dichotomy.”
You might like the book “Being Different” by Rajiv Malhotra. He discusses similar philosophical issues in it.
“The big problem with shallow multi-culturalism as we see it is the absence of history. ”
It has to be shallow. Many subjects must be covered in public schools and thus when it comes to things like culture and philosophy, not more than a brief overview can be expected. Inspired students will take the introduction they received in school outside the classroom and do their own expanded research. I think we’ve come to expect too much of teachers and schools. Students and parents also have to take responsibility for learning more on their own time.