Friday, May 01, 2009

Indoctrinate U alive and well in high schools too!

A high school student was allegedly lectured and scolded in front of his peers for reading Fox News.

In my experience, I found this to be the case more so in university of blatent disapprovals (e.g. Fraser Institute not acceptable academic source, but Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is okay!)

However, when I was in high school, I found that I didn't know about the biases of different news sources/organizations. Thus, when I was provided documents from Maude Barlowe and the Council for Canadians (fairly neutral sounding organization) from my teacher in class, I was not asked to be critical of what he was presented...just on whatever/whoever else was out there that was putting forth their "agenda".

Therefore, just appearing to be presented neutral information is still a form of indoctrination by teachers, especially when a student's critical thinking skills may not be as developed in high school as they would be in university.

A young man who identified himself only as Mitchell, an 18-year-old senior at Traverse City West Senior High School, called in to Rush Limbaugh's radio show Thursday and said he was yelled at in front of his classmates for reading the "wrong" news.

The teacher of his video production class saw what he was looking at and "proceeded to give me a 10-minute lecture on why I can't read FOX News ... and that I can only listen to BBC and other news venues," the student said.

James Feil, superintendent of Traverse City Area Public Schools, told FOXNews.com that any attempts to pressure students politically would go against his schools' policies.

"It would be inappropriate. I would clearly tell you that is not something that we would do anything to indoctrinate students here," he said. "That would clearly be a violation of our policies and guidelines, written or non-written."