Education as Indoctrination vs. Education as Initiation

The royal road to a thriving future leads through a growing forest of branching questions and a fertile field of endless budding visions.

Education has always been a form of indoctrination, delivering content (knowledge) in a secret sauce of unquestioned cultural assumptions and beliefs.

To begin to imagine a different kind of education, based on practices of initiation rather than indoctrination, let’s think about the differences between these two approaches to social conditioning.

Indoctrination stresses conformity to rules, adherence to social norms, and following orders; it reinforces hierarchy, with those at the top receiving the most benefit from the work of the group. Indoctrination runs on fear, trying to scare people into conforming to whatever the authorities believe will be best, without questioning—best for whom?

In contrast, initiation is about experimentation and nimble, innovative thinking. In initiatory societies, the individual’s success depends on the success of the group, and vice versa; the focus is on envisioning individual and collective flourishing, often by establishing right relations with the natural world, and then inviting everyone to work together to make the vision a reality.

Education as indoctrination shuts down questions, insisting on the memorization of the One Correct Answer, while education as initiation moves from question to question, always ready to be surprised by unexpected (and ever-provisional) answers.

Education as indoctrination produces docile, obedient workers, while education as initiation produces perpetual students who live their questions, often becoming radical thinkers, dissenters—even, at times, revolutionaries.

Fundamentally, education as indoctrination serves the past (the establishment, tradition), while education as initiation serves the future.

A clear model of this distinction is offered by Dagara shaman Malidoma Somé. Malidoma’s memoir, Of Water and the Spirit, recounts how he was indoctrinated by his education in a Catholic missionary school and how he broke free of that mind-prison just before he was to be sent to complete his training in Europe. Heading back to his village for the first time in years, he begged his elders to be allowed to participate in a traditional initiation. They were reluctant to allow it, as he was “old” for initiation, and had been, they knew, thoroughly indoctrinated into another culture. He was finally allowed to undertake the initiatory process, his eyes wide open to the possibility that he would not make it through alive.

Whereas Malidoma’s Catholic indoctrination taught him to uphold the traditions of the past through the repetition of ancient ecclesiastical writings, rituals and rules, his Dagara initiation brought him into direct contact with the numinous, vital, unpredictable world of Gaian Spirit, to receive teachings from nature and spirit beings designed to make him a stronger, wiser, more empathetic human being. Taking his place in the vast Dagara physical and metaphysical landscape, he was instructed to embrace the teaching embedded in his name—Malidoma, “make friends with strangers / make a bridge between worlds”—to become, rather than an upholder of tradition, a voyager into the unknown.

How he embraced this initiatory challenge is the story of the rest of his life, which can be followed through his subsequent books and the teaching organization he founded, which still continues today after his death. Rather than recycling old teachings to conserve the legacy of the past, Malidoma offered that legacy as a living seedbed of wisdom to create a better future—not just for his own people but for all people, and the Earth herself.

Photo by J. Browdy

Almost everyone alive today is a product of educational indoctrination into dominant worldviews that are, it is now clear, unsustainable for our planet. Yet even knowing this, we seem to be stuck in the rut of our own massive inertia. For the most part, educators continue pass on the same ideas and values that brought us to the current environmental cliff. Are we really all such lemmings?

If we were to turn away from education as indoctrination, towards education as initiation, how might the form and content of the contemporary educational project change?

To me it seems clear that the single most important skill we can teach, we old folks struggling to break free of our own indoctrinations, is how to ask provocative questions.

Everything should be up for questioning, but particularly the fundamental, often unspoken values and assumptions that have been handed down to us by the past—the questions to which we might think that we have the answers.

Now is a time to return to the most important question of all, asked endlessly by two-year-olds but then abandoned as indoctrination takes hold: WHY?

·      Why does our society encourage us to accumulate more and more wealth?

·      Why are we taught that the more we consume, the happier we’ll be?

·      Why are humans better than the other animals?

·      Why can’t planes use solar power to fly?

·      Why don’t we recycle and compost our garbage?

·      Why do we allow old trees to be cut down?

·      Why, why, why???

To me, a particularly important category of questioning comes in relation to our spiritual beliefs.

·      Why do we honor mystics of the past (saints, prophets, saviors) but call contemporary mystics “crazy”?

·      Why don’t we listen more carefully to the teachings being offered through contemporary channels?

·      Why aren’t people encouraged to connect more intentionally with the spirit world (as we all do every night in our dreams), to develop a relationship with the higher consciousness that might help us adapt to our rapidly changing planet?

These are some of my questions—you will have yours, and I don’t presume to have the right questions any more than I have the right answers.

To practice education as initiation is to encourage an abundance of questions, each one a signpost at a crossroad leading to alternative possible futures.

But asking questions is only the beginning, if our goal is to get out of our indoctrinated inertia and begin to be part of the change we wish to see in the world. It is crucial that we spend time, individually and collectively, meditating on just what kind of future we want to live into and co-create.

To create a thriving future, we must envision it with as much living color and detail as we can imagine, by asking the questions that will help us move from vision to reality.

·      What would a thriving future look like, taste like, smell like, sound like?

·      Whose joyful faces would surround me in that flourishing future?

·      What would we be doing, together and alone?

As we ask the questions, dream into the answers, and communicate our visions with others, we collectively create an initiatory co-education that will accelerate the possibility of positive change for us all.