TEACHING JUSTICE Indoctrination, Neutrality, and the Need for Alternatives Joel Westheimer University of Ottawa •. joelw@uottawa.ca Joseph Kahne Mills College • jkahne@mills.edu Paper presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association for the symposium Democracy Education and Indoctrination: The Dilemmas of Neutrality and its Alternatives. April 21, 2003, Chicago For the past few years, Joe Kahne and I have been studying programs that teach civic engagement. Several of these programs engage students in teaching for a kind of citizenship that we have been calling “justice-oriented citizenship” (Westheimer & Kahne, 2002). By justice-oriented citizenship we mean a conception of the democratic citizen as one who works with others to help improve society; it is a conception consistent with Vincent Harding’s vision of a democracy that involves constantly “participating in the creation of something new and better…thank what had existed previously” (1998, 685). Whenever we have given talks on the subject of justice-oriented civic education, we have invariably gotten a question that goes something like this: "Do you worry that the teachers in this program that you described have an agenda, that this agenda will prevent the free flow of ideas and indoctrinate students?" It wouldn’t surprise us if these teachers influence students with their ideas about the world; what surprises us is the number of educators who don't see the underlying, albeit more mainstream, ideology, “agenda,” or lack of “neutrality” at work in the enactment of curricula and teachings more generally. So it makes sense, first, to define indoctrination and clarify some points of departure. 1 The idea that indoctrination means to imbue one’s partisan position without allowing questioning or consideration of opposing views is the easiest one to dismiss as a bad 1 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers these two definitions of indoctrinate: 1 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments, to teach. This definition, no doubt, draws from the embedded word, doctrine which means “something that is taught” or “a principle or position.” 2 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle