> Frankly, K-12 teachers shouldn't be allowed to use captive
> audiences to propagandize one side of a political argument, however
> meritorious.
-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.
That's a naive view of power, as if a teacher who can undermine or even destroy a student's college prospects with a bad grade has to explicitly threaten anyone. Even if Bennish would never personally use such power, students can't read a teacher's mind to k now whether they will retaliate against an opposing view.
And the fact is that propaganda is as much in the facts selected as an argument made. Another propagandist would want to include the "facts" of intelligent design or whatever facts support their political views, and since students have a relatively low base of knowledge, those facts will have a disproportionate effect on forming their own view of the issue.
Which is why from the left and the right there is no much political energy spent on shaping curricula in the classroom. And schools have the legal right to discipline any teacher who deviates from the approved curriculum. Most towns don't exercise that power completely and give teachers some flexibility, but if teachers think their purpose is to slip in information outside "mainstream US political discourse", they should be campaigning for education curricula reform, not becoming teachers.
Nathan Newman