> From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> -Would Colorado teachers feel free to discuss with students the 65%
> -Solution, TABOR, and other issues that threaten public education and
> -teachers' jobs?
> -The school management wants that power to narrowly circumscribe
> -teachers' speech, which they can and do use for anti-union purposes
> -as in the case of OSU in 2000, and unions should fight that.
>
> Colleges and K-12 are very different places on free speech terms,
> both in substance and legally. College students choose their
> classes, while K-12 students have zero to very little choice in who
> teaches them.
>
> Frankly, K-12 teachers shouldn't be allowed to use captive
> audiences to propagandize one side of a political argument, however
> meritorious. Should we also defend the free speech right of
> teachers to propagandize for their religious faith as well? Not
> only is allowing teacher propaganda anti-democratic in principle,
> but it's the kind of thing that feeds the anti-public school
> movement towards vouchers.
What is propaganda, though? If Jay Bennish compelled his students to subscribe to his view, on pain of failing the class or getting a lower grade or getting humiliated in the classroom, surely what he said would count as an effort to force them to accept it as dogma (or else). He did no such thing. He presented facts and viewpoints that are decidedly excluded from mainstream US political discourse and probably rarely included in US K-12 public education and asked students to think about them. I'd venture to say that what's truly harmful propaganda is much of public education that allows students to graduate from high school _without having ever heard of_ Washington's involvement in Colombia's civil war, bombing of the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, sabotages against Cuba, etc., or the terrorist acts committed by bands of right-wing Zionists. How are they to understand the United States or the world accurately while remaining completely uninformed of them?
The students who rallied for Bennish are aware of what's generally missing here and what he supplied to remedy that.
A large majority of Americans still cannot afford to obtain college diplomas. If exposure to crucial facts that would allow them to make sense of the history of the United States and the world they live in, as well as critical thinking about it, has to be postponed till they get to college or graduate school, most of them are essentially deprived of knowledge they desperately need.
Or even Faust. Got a devil in it. :-0
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>