Education as Indoctrination

Résumé

We take a new look at the relation between education and democracy. There is a well-known correlation between education and democracy. But there is a sizable and rising number of countries with medium to high levels of education and no democracy. We take a view that education policy can be an instrument of indoctrination: in democracies, it propagates democratic principles (and as a result, educated democracies are less likely to revert to autocracies, a well established empirical factoid), but in autocracies, it can propagate political quietism and respect for authority (and as a result, autocrats too can have an incentive to educate). We illustrate this phenomenon with the case of the Arab world. Using data from the World Value Survey, we show that while world-wide, education tends to increase individual preferences for a democratic order, it does much less so in the Arab world. We explore three channels through which this ideological effect of education operates. We show that relative to the rest of the world, more education boosts the respect for authority and the values of patriarchy, instills a fear of instability and chaos, and leads to quietism and more limited civic involvement.Work in progress.