Human Development
Ideological re-education
Description:
Educational methods can be used for ideological ends to accomplish shifts and alterations in the individual's sense of inner identity. Four general approaches may be used, singly or in combination: coercion, exhortation, therapy and realization.[Coercion]. The message to the individual is that he must change and become what the authority is telling him to become or else suffer the consequences (varying from social ostracism, through emotional and physical pain to, in some instances, death). The aim is to produce a demoralized follower. It is directed at the most primitive of human emotions and stimulates the desire to submit completely.
[Exhortation]. The message to the individual is that he should change (if he is a moral person) and become what the authority is telling him to become because of the moral superiority of that state. The goal is to create converts and disciples, changed in accordance with the specific ideological convictions of the authority. It focuses on the individual's desire to improve himself and reject his current shameful and morally inferior state .
[Therapy]. The message to the individual is that he can change from his present unhealthy state, if he has a genuine desire to be healthy (in the manner defined by the authority), and if he is willing to follow the authority's method and guidance. Its goal is physical and emotional health. The appeal is directed to the individual as a reasonable, health-seeking, balanced person.
[Realization]. The message to the individual is that he can change in such a way as to express more fully his own potential, provided that he is willing to confront himself with ideas and approaches which challenge his present ways of knowing and acting. Its goal is to produce an individual who expresses his creative potential to the full and to the limit of his capability.
These approaches may be combined by some authority in subtle ways with the object of achieving some form of totalitarian thought reform. It may then be very difficult to distinguish between the desirable application of such techniques and applications which infringe upon human rights, particularly since the undesirable features may closely resemble normal processes of human change in such settings as:
[Education]. In the student's act of attaining knowledge (with every new concept or technique acquired), his previous patterns of identity as well as belief must be altered and rearranged, however slightly, in accordance with the educator's view or the viewpoints embodied in (or excluded from) the materials provided. Students may feel unable to question such presentations, or to inquire into alternative perspectives, without some form of sanction. In this way the individual's intellectual growth and his quest for realization are hampered. The positive alternative is a rejection of omnipotence on the part of the educator, a balance between a vigorous presentation of available knowledge, and encouragement of those aspects of the student's imagination which may eventually transcend that knowledge in new discovery.
[Psychology]. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy both focus on re-educating an individual concerning his understanding of himself at the most fundamental levels of his being. But therapists may perceive their particular professional body as imbued with a near-mystical aura, demanding from them a degree of ideological purity, making them hesitant to criticize its teaching and thus leading to adoption of a pattern of intellectual conformity. The therapist's notion of reality may also be coloured by his own ideological convictions about such matters as psychological health, social conformity, and maturity, and their relations to the problems of personal identity which trouble his client.
[Religion]. Organized religion may lead to exaggerated control and manipulation of the individual, the flooding of the social environment with a perspective of guilt and shame, and emphasis upon the individual's depravity and worthlessness and upon his need to submit abjectly to a vengeful deity. This may be done within the framework of an exclusive and closed system of ultimate truth. Alternatively, religious settings may stress, for example, the individual's worth and possibilities as well as his limitations, and his capacity to change as well as impediments to that change. This opens the way to emotional and intellectual growth and a broadened sensitivity.
[Science]. Similarly, political life may be subject to purges and inquisitions of varying degrees of seriousness. The scientific method may be deified and advocated as the sole basis for liberating man from social encumbrances and from all irrational features of society, by exposing these as unscientific and unnecessary in a truly scientific environment.
Broader:
Education Related:
Thought reform