[Vox]

My school has no computer labs, so if I want to do any work, I slide into any class that's in session and hope they have a free computer. Classes are almost always in session during the day.

So I joined one class and quietly minded my own business as the teacher lectured. It was about social media and its power to effect change, which was pretty neat. She cited a case last year between Greenpeace and Nestlé, in which Greenpeace hassled Nestlé about using palm oil from Indonesia (problem being that Indonesia is full of rainforest, which the farmers are depleting!). It ended up being a mess, but a victory from Greenpeace's POV, and the upshot is Nestlé agrees to use palm oil only from farmers who are not destroying the environment.

So that was cool - processed palm oil is unhealthy for you anyway, I believe buying local is better (can't we get oil from local sources? Does it have to come from thousands of miles away?), and I'm happy that Nestlé agreed to get responsible about holding the farmers it employs to being responsible themselves. Old-growth forest, yay.

However, that wasn't the message. The real message for the class was:

If you are a self-righteous little ass and can join with hundreds of like-minded others to cyberbully and pester someone, IT'S GOOD. That "someone" was a multibillion dollar international company, so that was EVEN BETTER. All that matters is that YOU believe you are right and that THEY disagree with you. And don't forget to glory in your superior knowledge of the internet, with which you can leverage and speak to power...there was all kinds of political jargon. -_-

I don't see Big Business as the enemy. I didn't get up in class to say that, as it wasn't my class, but, I just don't. Big Business provides jobs, innovates new products, and helps civilize the world, for example, those poor farmers in Indonesia can maybe get dental care and buy new tractors. Big Business can be greedy and pitiless, but also incredibly helpful, useful and a part of civilization that we can't afford to destroy.

Maybe it's TL: DR, but I hated that the teacher was including so much propaganda with her lecture. I believe she is doing it with the blessing of the school, as well. (Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Nestlé had shares in the school...lol. Or maybe Cadbury does, lol.) I hate that it wasn't a neutral lecture. It was so damn politically charged that even I felt pressured to go out and speak to power, and join up with my grassroot friends to overthrow people who actually make money and provide jobs. It was like religion, that class. Ugh!!




So...do your teachers ever make you feel like they're preaching a religion, rather than presenting a neutral picture so you can draw your own conclusions?

[Leah]

I'm actually really lucky that my more opinionated classes are generally taught by neutral teachers. For example, my religious education class has a lot of touchy subjects like abortion, capital punishment, etc. but my teacher's always held back her opinion to let us form our own opinions on the matters. I'd hate to be in a class like that; I can't stand it when people are told what to think and don't even bother to look at the other side of an argument.

[Ashy]

My sister is becoming a teacher atm and they are told that they cant pick sides they have to teach the kids the neutral view and then both sides of the story and let them pick for themselves.

[Skykittykat]

I've also fared well in this respect. For example, I'm Wiccan. I've recently converted from a very gray space between atheistis and agnostic. It was a religious choice that I thought about for a long time before deciding to convert. Here's the kicker. My entire school is almost entirely christian/catholic, so I've been getting a lot of crap about it.. This semester I'm taking a world history class and at present we are studying the middle ages. Now the fact of the matter is that during said time period thousands of women who allied themselves with Wicca were burned at the stake but in most classes teachers would convienently leave out that little detail and just carry on with the lecture of how great and amazing the roman catholic church was. My teacher didn't. He told the story from both sides with no prejudices and he didn't glorify the church. He simply told us all the truth, no matter how ugly it was. That's why he's one of my favorite teachers. He doesn't beautify history to favor any group of people, he tells it how it is, and I'm extremely lucky to have such a great teacher.

[Vox]

Our school is a privately owned trade school...so they're teaching us a trade, and how to use it. And when and why and where. It really should be only HOW, and leave the other decisions alone. >: (

Our state schools are neutral, though, I think...not sure anymore. But I believe that all the gov't-funded schools are supposed to respect everyone's beliefs.

@skykitty - that is lucky. Protestants (whatever they were called before Martin Luther) and Jews were also extremely out of favor with the Roman Catholic Church...I respect the RC as it did a lot of good work, even now, but I was raised on stories of how evil and corrupt it was. Think Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
It's valuable to get the story from both sides.

Is your school a Catholic school, or is it that the student body mostly is?

[Soul]

I actually haven't. Most of teachers at my school are very neutral about anything, and the ones that do defend a point of view also listen to the other side and then let us draw our own conlusions.

[Chickenbone]

I've had a few teachers do that in my life... especially in college where it's so much worse when they do it.

And speaking of 'sounding like preaching a religion'
My Psychology teacher ALWAYS puts religion in with our topic!
Which is really irritating.
He always talks about pretty much how 'stupid' women are and relating it to the bible and everything.

Of course, my teacher doesn't hide what he's talking about. He's very, VERY blunt.

[johnny]

I've been pretty lucky in college, I think. I mean, I'm currently in an Introduction to Religion class taught by a retired ordained minister, and you would expect there to be a real Christian slant on everything but he's very open-minded and stresses that everyone in the class should be, too. It's a wonderful class, really.

On the other hand, I did have a professor who would go on about her political views a lot. She would pepper the lecture with "facts" about George W. Bush, like how he has the lowest IQ of all the presidents in history (he doesn't) and how he's a racist who refused to sell his home to non-whites. Pretty much, if you go to Snopes.com and look up disparaging things about George Bush, she believed all of them absolutely and without question and told them to us like she was giving a lesson from the textbook. She also occasionally went on mini-tirades about how all conservatives are ill-educated Christian bigots.

The class was "Success in Learning". It had nothing to do with politics whatsoever, but I suppose some people think if they stand in front of a bunch of impressionable students they have the right to rant about their personal views.

She was, thankfully, the only professor I've ever had that was like that.

[Skykittykat]

Vox ~ Yeah, I know that the RCC isn't that bad now, and I know they do a lot of good, but after a while you get sick of people beautifying their past, especially as stained as it was in the morally gray regions. And it's not a catholic school, it's just that the majority of this school is christian or catholic or atheist. I'm relatively certain that I'm the only Wiccan in the school. My mom's catholic though, I get a moral tirade about how I'm doomed to an eternity of burning in the flames of hell every time I carry on a conversation to her that has the slightest hint of religous weight. I'm really, really glad I don't have to put up with it at school to.

[Arachnocampa]

Even though I'm not a religious person and tend to have a negative outlook on it, my chemistry teacher last year was basically saying "science is superior to religion, blah blah, science has always been right" and... again, I'm definitely not the biggest fan of religion, but considering the fact that most kids in that class are probably Christians or something, that was just... I dunno, kind of rude. I mean, I don't go around openly bashing religions or shoving what I think down people's throats. Hell, I've even stuck up for a few religions before! (But that's a different story.)

[Rika]

I had a few teachers like that when I was in university.
The history teacher I had was extremely liberal, which is fine, but he would bash everything else that didn't mesh with his viewpoint. It was annoying to go to class and instead of learning history, learning about why Christians and republicans were dumb, etc. I eventually stopped listening in class. Luckily I still passed it. xP

[Echo-chan713]

I used to have a Biology teacher in 9th grade, she would give you 2 options of her teaching skills: her way or the highway. While the school was in session, they were building an extension to the lunchroom (which we were right behind it), there were no air conditioning system, and the windows and door to the outside were going to be destroyed for the wall and the fumes of the chemicals and tar affected my lungs greatly so I had to leave multiple times.

I did it so often that I was coughing, hacking, and heaving up a storm and it was a crucial time to leave but she beat me to the door and locked everyone in the classroom and I have to suffer an attack all by myself for an hour and a half.

[Dee]

My teacher didn't seem religious, but at heart she was. We were doing Religion stuff which bore me to death, but I decided to go with my friend who's smart and a Jew (lol stereotype), so it'd be easier. So I rose my hand, and told the teacher that I'd be with my friend and we'd be doing Jewish cultures. My teacher made a face that was like "Ewwww...". Then somebody said Christianity, and she simled. I was like WTF. I didn't dare say anything, but later my friend told some guy (I forgot who it was, maybe the principal or something, but nothing happened). Then there's a long boring story that follows, which I won't type, since it also ends in failure.

[Echo-chan713]

So did she lost the war or you lost the war Dee?

[Pisces]

I have to agree, I highly dislike when it's obvious my lectures aren't unbiased. I understand humans are not robots, we can't keep bias completely out of anything we do, but teachers usually have some sort of art of filtering enough out that the bias isn't MAKING the lecture.

I once spoke up to a teacher I had about her obvious bias showing through the lecture, and she got sooo mad. Pulled me out of the class I had after hers to bitch at me in the hall for "insubordination" and making her look back in the class. Ugh. The sad thing? She left the school for a couple years and I hear they hired her back, with the same unfiltered lectures. =\

[krankhaus]

Hoooooly hell, I had a teacher like that last semester.

I mean, I sort of agreed with her on a lot of points, but she totally put in her beliefs.

It was a class on social problems (lol, that's a big sign right there that it's going to be an opinionated class). But anyway, the professor was a complete liberal hippie. Everything she said was about how the wealth should be distributed, and how the inner-city kids need to be given a helping hand, and how we need to have more integrated suburban areas.

Not that I don't agree. She was just really putting her opinion on everyone. It was kind of crazy. Everything she said made complete sense, don't get me wrong, but so much opinion. O_O