Review Article: Commitment to Liberal Education

The central purpose of Thiessen's book is to defend religious nurture and instruction against the charge of indoctrination. In doing so he questions the prevailing ideal of liberal education which tmderlies the charge of religious indoctrination. But Thiessen's ambition reaches even farther: he also wants to sketch the outlines of a new ideal of liberal education, in the extension of which a redefinition of indoctrination can be presented. From the beginning the author is quite explicit about his own commitment: "My roots are Christian; I was raised in a Mennonite home . . " (p. xii). And he also makes clear that his analyses should be placed "within the context of a fairly conservative interpretation of Christian doctrine" (p. 29; see also: p. 55). In Thiessen's opinion the method of conceptual analysis is less suitable for his inquiry: "I wish to move beyond the sometimes narrow and seemingly futile preoccupation with conceptual clarification . . " (p. 5). Terms ought to be understood in their historical context (p. 33), and Thiessen considers it "more appropriate to aim for a 'theory of indoctrination', rather than an analysis of the concept of indoctrination" (p. 232). On the basis of prevailing descriptive analyses of this term, Thiessen presents a rescriptive inquiry of indoctrination and liberal education. The driving force of a rescriptive inquiry is a kind of intellectual discontentment with existing (configurations of) central concepts, and the product of such a rescription has to be more adequate from a theoretical viewpoint than certain current (frameworks of) central educational concepts (Steutel, 1988). Later I will answer the question whether Thiessen has succeeded in this undertaking.