Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unabomber
It's great if these movies are being showed to students for the right reasons, like debating the issue at hand, that's education. But if the movie is being shown to kill time or to say that it's the gospel then they might as well introduce religion into the public school system.
I don't disagree that they show it, it's how they show it and the follow up discusion that should be talked about.
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I agree--to the extent that teachers shouldn't treat films, particularly dogmatic ones, as though they were merely teaching tools. One of my gripes is that young people aren't being taught to think critically about the things that they get told. Too often schools teach a fixed curriculum rather than giving students the tools they'll need to become lifelong learners on their own--to inform themselves about issues, to distinguish reputable from non-reputable sources of information, and to create their own well-informed ideas about things. Not to say that there aren't teachers out there who are doing this--there are. But I feel like they're the mavericks in a system designed to make young people into compliant receptacles for received knowledge rather than producers of knowledge in their own right.
/rant.
On the other hand, schools shouldn't treat every debate as though all sides were equally valid. There is such a thing as objective truth--and it is possible to assign different value to different ways of knowing. This is the problem with intelligent design in the science classroom--it's not science, and if we teach our children that it is, we do society a disservice.
But teaching the debates in a class where the context justifies it? A great idea, something there isn't enough of.