One of my favorite things to do when I go to my local library is to read the requests to have a book removed, which are posted on the bulletin board in the entryway. If you’ve never done this, you should. Regardless of your beliefs, you’re likely to be amazed at the depth and breadth of material people want removed for various ideological reasons. It’s stunning.
On a related note, Fox News was on one of the TVs in my view from the cardio machines at my gym, and I noticed a headline that read something like “Students forced to create ISIS recruiting posters for lesson on propaganda.” (The online version of the story is here.) The tone of the headline, the use of the word “forced,” and the subsequent print story portray this as a bad thing.
These types of headlines appear frequently about school assignments that offend. While some of them are truly offensive, many don’t meet that standard, including the aforementioned. I can’t think of a better way to teach students to recognize propaganda than to create it, particularly as it relates to current events.
What most of these “offensive” assignments do is ask kids to think from another perspective, sometimes an unpopular one. Think about what it’s like to recruit for a terrorist organization. Consider how a plantation owner might try to influence an election through the 3/5 of a vote given to his slaves. What military strategies might have allowed the Axis powers to win World War II? None of these are popular perspectives. But they are things that happened.
While we’d all like our children to agree with our political, religious, and personal perspectives, that’s not the goal. The goal is to raise successful, functioning human beings who can think for themselves and make their own decisions. Seeing others perspectives does that. It also…
- …creates empathy.
- …helps kids recognize when they’re being sold to – whether through propaganda or just marketing.
- …discourages racism and intolerance.
I’m sure that list of bullets could be much, much longer, but here’s the end point of this: If you don’t raise your kids to see other perspectives, you’re raising a sheep.