I’ve told this story before, but I think it bears repeating. As I came towards the end of my schooling, I was seriously thinking of the services as a career path. And I sought out a number of my teachers for advice, asking their opinion. Most of my teachers were a fairly conservative lot, most of the older ones were veterans of the Second World War, and many of the younger ones had some military service as well. And I wasn’t at all suprised at their support.
But I went to the Chaplain - who was also a teacher, taught us scripture. I respected him, and that’s why I went to him, but I knew he was a pacifist and more specifically I knew that he was quite active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. So I expected his views to be different.
Instead he told me that the services were a good career, and that I would find myself challenged in ways that I’d never been before and which would be good for me, and that there was real honour in serving your country.
I was very surprised at this, given his views, and I said so. And what he said has stayed with me, all my life, and especially since I’ve become a teacher myself.
He told me that he didn’t hide his political views, but as a teacher it wasn’t his job to impose them on his students. He said that he would view himself as a profound failure as a teacher if his students grew up parroting his views. It was his job to teach students how to make their own decisions, and how to make up their own minds about issues - not to tell them what to decide, or what they should think. His success as a teacher was most evident in the students who were able to challenge his views. Not the students who could simply repeat them.
Now, today, I am a history teacher (my second career - I did serve in the Australian Defence Force) and I try to live up to that idea. I don’t think I would be able to teach history effectively to high school age students without being free to express my beliefs - but I always make it clear when I am talking about what I believe as opposed to the hard facts, and I do my best to also mention other alternative viewpoints fairly. It’s about teaching kids how to think - not what to think. And they need to see that their teachers do form opinions and have opinions and can defend those opinions, or we are failing to make it clear to them why we study these things in the first place.
Government teachers are allowed to dominate and control politics in the USA.