Who owns your mind?: The hard truth behind our education system transcript

Imagine that you have adopted three children from a foreign country. In the taxi, you hear them speak their native language. So, you ask the taxi driver what they're saying. "I'm pretty sure they just rank moral." he replies. This is exactly what happened when Bill and Carol Jensen adopted three kids from a Romanian institution. 1966, Romania. President Nicolae Ceaușescu initiated a program to rapidly increase the birth rate, resulting in thousands of children being institutionalized.

Following the revolution that ended Ceaușescu's rule in 1989, journalists began documenting these institutions. There was only one caregiver for 15 children, and they were precisely obliged to be unaffectionate. The children who cried eventually stopped crying. And even though all their basic needs were met, the children were deprived of attention, emotional support, and stimulation. A decade later, Dr. Charles Nelson and his team evaluated the institutionalized children.

They found the children had lower IQs than normally developing infants showed signs of underdevelopment. Revealing that when children live in these environments, the deprivation can cause developmental deficits that may not be fully recoverable. Though these institutions were an extreme case, the same experience-dependent brain exists in every classroom of today's world. The question is not what experiences are being withheld, but rather which ones are deliberately provided, and when does education start being something else?

Does indoctrination only happen in dystopias? So, how does neuroplasticity in infants even work? Well, during the brain's developing years, the brain has both sensitive and critical periods. A sensitive period is, as the name says, when the effect of experience on the brain is particularly strong during a limited period of development. Such periods allow experience to instruct neural circuits to process or represent information in a way that is adaptive for the individual.

But if in a sensitive period an experience is withheld or fails to occur, it will probably be incredibly difficult to redirect the brain to a normal developmental trajectory. Even then, there might not be a full recovery. Conversely, if this happens during a critical period, the effects are thought to be lasting and largely irreversible to the individual. Then, if the brain is so plastic, we might ask ourselves, to what extent are our beliefs and personality traits defined solely by the environment?

In a study by Edwin S. Zalmagier, they compared monozygotic twins to dizygotic twins. The study showed that monozygotic twins were more similar, but not just because they shared 100% of their DNA, but rather because their genes made them actively choose the same environments. The research showed that even if genes only influence 10% of a person's environment, the old mathematical models miscalculated the genetic influence on the overall traits by 23%.

Now that we've got the science covered, how does education, or for that matter, any socialization influence our children? Well, first things first, we need to define what autonomy is. Autonomy is, as the Oxford Dictionary says, the ability of an individual to act and make decisions without being controlled by anyone else. Philosopher Susie Killmister believes that there are five dimensions of autonomy, and to prove autonomy, they have to follow this thought process: knowledge of the act, self-knowledge, self-definition, internal self-realization, and external self-realization.

The two dimensions we're going to focus on are the second dimension, which is self-knowledge. This dimension consists of finding the truth about oneself. And the third dimension, self-definition. This differs from the previous dimension, since it goes beyond knowing the truth, but rather actively choosing it and endorsing a specific beliefs, values, and goals. Killmister's five dimensions require a stable baseline. Even though adults' brains are also quite plastic, nothing can precede the plasticity of a child's brain as they are navigating the world.

They aren't just reframing beliefs or redirecting their life, they are actively learning to walk, talk, write, speak, and all while building their own beliefs. But here's the thing. Contrary to what one may think, an adolescent's brain actually has a higher malleability than a child's when it comes to social, emotional, and executive functions. Because while during childhood, most children learn basic functions like reading and maths, but in adolescence is when the brain prepares you for adulthood, molding your beliefs.

So, to define yourself, you would need a stable, developed brain foundation to start from. Did I mention that self-definition is practically impossible since a child or teen cannot fully endorse their own values because most are still adopting device and beliefs from their environment. Self-knowledge in this case is also compromised since if the education system teaches you what to think instead of how to think, the child's self-knowledge will just be a reflection of the teachers' or government's ideology, not their true internal self.

So, we're basically back at square one. Here is when Kristjánsson and his paper on close-minded beliefs and indoctrination come to rescue us. In this paper, Kristjánsson says that indoctrination is instruction which inculcates the agent with close-minded beliefs in a particular way. But, what are considered close-minded beliefs and how do they differ from epistemically insulting content? Well, close-minded beliefs is when an individual believes something and they are not willing to seriously consider evidence or arguments that might contradict them.

Epistemically insulting content is when an individual believes something which in itself prohibits its own questioning. For example, our belief is correct and anyone who questions it is immoral or bad. Following this definition, we could say that indoctrination does not depend on the content itself, not even if there is evidence that supports it, or if there is a great mass of individuals who believe it, but rather the way it is taught.

This then covers the sad reality of our education system because let us look what at one of the scenarios Kristjánsson proposes. A professor instructs his pupils in relatively uncontroversial geological facts, A, B, and C, such that the professor intends for them to adopt those beliefs on the basis of his instruction. Moreover, he manifests his belief that I disagreeing with A, B, and C is highly irrational and tantamount to being crazy.

This is a case of indoctrination. The way the teacher instructs the pupils in is not ideological nor controversial and otherwise benign. Instead, it's the way the professor manifests beliefs that are epistemically insulting. In conclusion, indoctrination happens when someone is taught to believe something in a way that makes them unwilling or feel that they are prohibited from seriously questioning it or consider alternatives.

Now, are you so sure that indoctrination only happens in dystop- in novels or that it hasn't happened to you?