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Education and Indoctrination An invention of a revolutionary paint by an uneducated novice caused ICI to take a hard look at their research department. According to Alternative Science: ICI's own paints laboratory held an internal audit and what they found puts this claim in an entirely different light. For the audit showed that the most scientifically qualified of its research chemists had contributed to the least number of patents, and the fewer scientific qualifications the staff possessed, the greater the number of patents they had contributed to. In the most striking case of all, the person who had contributed to most ICI's patents had no scientific qualifications at all. This confirms something I've believed for some time, that is that there is a thin line between education and indoctrination. In fact, often the two terms are used interchangeably. The media talks about ‘educating’ people about AIDs or global warming when in actual fact they mean bringing people around to their way of thinking. If what you are teaching is correct then, indeed, it may be considered education. If someone says that water boils at an arbitrary temperature we can probably educate them by using a thermometer and showing that it’s fairly consistent. If someone believes that there is life after death and psychics are in contact with the spirits of dead people, are we educating them by explaining that isn't the case? This all assumes that there is such a thing as truth. There are many people who don't believe in an absolute truth, simply that the end justifies the means. So if the idea is to bring people around to a particular political view or to convince them to listen to establishment scientists rather than new-age gurus, then it doesn't really matter that we tell a few lies to bring that about. In fact this thinking runs through the politics on the right and the left, and also runs through much of the Sceptics literature. Even if there is a grain of truth in some ideas, the thinking goes, the damage done by people believing it far outweighs any truth. Much of what passes for education in universities is really indoctrination and the research by ICI illustrates that students are simply being channeled into a particular way of thinking.