As an educator, one of the things that I have always found interesting is that most of my conservative collegues have always held close the concept of presenting ideas in the classroom in a non-biased fashion. Instead, teaching students how to think for themselves, gather information, be constructive skeptics and question, question, question.... respectfully though, even the educators themselves. This opens up healthy debate and discord which is needed for true learning and understanding to take place. As a conservative educator, I have found that by empowering students to think for themselves with a healthy sense of individualism and critical thinking skills, students are enabled to later become more successful in life, less dependent on the government and will likely become a conservative. This is why liberal educators must instill their ideology with threats of failure and ostrasization because the endstate is to create a “mindbot”, a minion of the state. I can tell you from many years of experience, I can walk into a classroom anywhere and determine the political affiliation of the educator. And as this article suggests, the media uses these same types of tactics as well.... case in point, if Obama loses it is because of the racist nature of a majority of Americans not because his ideology is flawed.
Interesting post. I recently taught in Russia for a few weeks and the instructors found it perplexing that I would ask the students questions. Normally, all classes were taught as lectures . After classes, the teachers would ask me why I would teach that way and I would explain.
zimfam: As a conservative teacher myself, I applaud your classroom teaching strategies. I do the same in my classroom. My approach is to question statements students make as they come up in discussions, usually informally. My liberal collegues fill their minds with the standard, biased misinformation. For instance, a student might say, “America consumes 25% of the world’s oil supply, but we are only 3% of the world’s population.” So then I sort of stop and consider the statement and say something like “Well do you think any of that oil is used by American industries to manufacture products people around the world can benefit from having? Do you think America is being greedy or is using the oil to benefit the rest of the world.” I never come out and say what they believe or have learned is wrong, I just put questions in their minds that I can tell they’ve never been taught or has never occurred to them before. I can tell that by their reactions. I’m not kidding myself that I can single-handedly overcome the liberal brainwashing by stridently confronting students with the truth, I’d loose my job, for one thing. But I’m using reason to get them to think, and to question what they accepted as fact, and then expect that they will reject the liberal notions and replace them with new thinking on their own. The goals and objectives of a conservative teacher.