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Well said. And the 17 year old high school student has been denigrated by Bennish, his lawyer and now columnists who claim to know what really happened.

I've seen the young man interviewed 3 or 4 times and he appears genuine and won't sit back and take the bashing.

The problem of politics in the classrooms maybe not just a teacher issue but a student one as well.

Kids would start to do this:
Well, I better not express myself, cause then my teacher might disagree with my opinion or tell me it's political or not relevant. What happens then, no discussion with any real meat occurs. No debate, no cognitive dissonance, etc.

I've experienced this in even a college classroom and I felt as if the teacher was muzzling my opinion. It leads me to wonder if classrooms are more about indocrination instead of information, because the information even if not obviously political can contain subtle undertones or persuasion. Where do we draw the line?

It seems untenable to me to deny first amendment rights on the basis of cognitive dissonance caused by political discussion that might occur occasionally or briefly in a semester. Cognitive dissonance seems to me a natural outcome of vigorus discussion of whatever is at hand, be it geography or biology or ethics.

According to National History Day, 80% of those teaching high school history have neither a major or a minor in the subject. When I began teaching Social studies in 1965, I had majors in history and art history and a minor in social science (130 hours). By 1985, we were graduating teachers with 24 hours, total, and I was overqualified. I often taught geography on the secondary and college level, but I taught those students what I had learned in grammar school.

With respect to his assertion that he was sparking thinking and the school policy that both sides be given. I would argue that his presentation was so wacko that it represents a tiny minority in America, surely not one of two sides.