Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
At least you acknowledge that every school is different, and hope you can extend that to your experiences are your own.
In an alternative opinion, me and my fellow colleagues often cringed at election time because the STUDENTS were (and are) much more political than school policies allow teachers to be. Not only would "indoctrination" have lead to suspension or firing, regardless or which side of the aisle the teacher was, even mentioning who you were going to vote for for president or how you were going to vote on ballot measures was totally against the rules. As "authority figures" discussing politics could be construed as influencing, and was (and is) strictly prohibited. Teachers were not allowed to have political bumper stickers, wear pins or t-shirts advocating a certain cause or politician.
I was a part of student government in college, so I did get to see the political views of my teachers on both sides, but for the most part the politicizing and influencing was much more strong student to student than teacher to student. But, again, every school has its own policies and environment.
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Yes, my experiences are my own, as are yours. But mine were very different from what you're describing. I had many teachers who voiced their political views in class, even when it wasn't the subject of the class at all... for instance, my computer science teacher was one of the worst, taking anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes(!) each day of a 50 minute class to rant about the latest politics... needless to say, nobody learned a lot about computers in that class. Classes in the liberal arts, especially history, politics, literature, etc had the cover of "this is related to what the class is supposed to be about" and so would spend entire days discussing the teachers' views on politics and issues. And not in a "here's a balanced view of what the left and right each believe", presented in such a non-biased way that the teacher's own views were unknown. In fact, in one Poli-Sci class, the teacher would only give the left-wing view and then would call on me, the only admitted conservative in the class, for the "Republican response". He and I literally had hour long debates in class sometimes! Luckily, most of the teachers I had stopped short of lowering the grade of a conservative (there there were 1 or 2 that did, and I learned to keep my mouth shut in those classes.)