Yep, conventional economics teaching is indoctrination.
Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
"What is indoctrination and how is it different from regular instruction?
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan
This is interesting to me as a former professor of philosophy. Philosophical questions are "philosophical" because they are not yet decidable based on commonly agreed upon criteria, in which case they become either logical questions decidable by syntactical analysis or scientific ones decidable on evidence.
This positivist rule is itself not generally agreed upon, however. There are other factors involved, since all human endeavors are based on language involving the construction of frameworks and models based on context, a good deal of which is historical and cultural. Criteria themselves are norms that are context-generated rather than absolute, or "natural."
Calling a debate settled therefore risks creating obstacles to knowledge. Moreover, the view that introductory courses at the undergraduate level need to be simplified and organized by teaching a particular theory and its models is a gratuitous assumption that limits learning and does a disservice to students.
In the case of economics, it is also a setback for democratic society where informed deliberation is a requirement for exercising suffrage.
Indoctrination is propaganda that raises the question, "In whose interest?" aka Cui bono?
Nussbaum doesn't think so, however.
According to these criteria, for example, all but the most philosophical and adventurous courses in neoclassical economics will count as indoctrination, since undergraduate students certainly are taught the major conclusions of that field as established truths which they are not to criticize from the perspective of any other theory or worldview; they are taught that these truths form a unitary way of seeing the world; and, especially where microeconomics is concerned, the data of human behavior are presented as seen through the lens of that theory. It is probably good that these conditions obtain at the undergraduate level, where one cannot simultaneously learn the ropes and criticize them–although one might hope that the undergraduate will pick up in other courses, for example courses in moral philosophy, the theoretical apparatus needed to raise critical questions about these foundations.Indoctrinate people and hope that they get straightened out elsewhere? From a philosophical POV this is just outrageous.
Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
"What is indoctrination and how is it different from regular instruction?
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan
