'Enculturation': acquisition of conceptual blind spots and epistemologicalprejudices

Traditional science teaching has relied on 'chalk and talk'. In recent year s, 'authentic science' has become an alternative slogan that many educators easily adopted into their pedagogic discourses, for it was associated with 'getting students to do the real stuff'. However, authentic science when i t is not accompanied by reflection on representations of knowledge more gen erally, can also mean to enculturate (and worse, indoctrinate) students to a particular epistemology. In this article, the author provides two example s of invisible ways in which students of ecology are enculturated to partic ular ideologies. The unreflected matter-of-factness of the discursive and m athematical representations in lectures and textbooks makes the world appea r to be typologically decomposable (into variables) which have clear, mathe matically fully determined relationships (topologies). In this way, school science has a certain likeness with indoctrination. The author concludes by suggesting that science (or mathematics, history etc.) courses need to hav e built in moments in which students can critically examine disciplinary kn owledge representations and the way these are constituted.