Originally posted by snowinscotland
I would agree.... Who am I to decide what is right for another persons child.... except that we accept as a society that, even though a parent might not want their child to be educated, the law says they have to be.
I am sure there are some parents that would not have liked that idea at first.
On the other hand, I agree that we should be free to ...[text shortened]... gating the closed mentality (for whatever reasons) of the parents. Not an easy line to draw.....
But surely that is the point, that indoctrination is not the same as education.
That may be the point—and also the short answer to your questions of my post. If part of education is to teach children (following the developmental course) to be able to think for themselves, it’s hard to imagine how to do that while teaching them to become suicide bombers.
But it’s not strictly a parental versus societal issue. One might recall the Hitler Youth, for example.
We are all born to a given set of parents, with their beliefs, and into a given cultural matrix with its beliefs. We have probably all (or at least most of us) experienced some cultural indoctrination. Some people learn to be able to step out of that to at least critically question it; some don’t. My point about post-hypnotic suggestion was that some people may not even realize that they are, in certain cases, “propagating the closed mentality”, not only of their parents, but of their culture at large.
Some people who “convert” from one cultural paradigm to another also adopt a closed mentality with regard to the new one, perhaps to attempt to overcome in themselves some set of insecurities.
It is the closed mentality—and its (whatever) causes—that is the problem as I see it.