>>4326I don't believe that anybody here would contest that those are propaganda. The question isn't what the ruling class does, it's what we should do.
Now it's possible that there's some talking past each other and that people are using words (like "propaganda" or "influence") differently. But I would say that (1) teachers can never be truly neutral even if they try (for instance they must select what materials students are presented with, and so on), but also that (2) there's a difference between teaching students to think particular conclusions and to think critically and , and that there's a danger in pursuing the former to the degree that it harms the latter.
The goal of critical thinking isn't to produce a truly "independent" thinker. A smart, reflective, curious, critical person who happens to be gentry in Song dynasty China is going to think a lot differently than a smart, reflective, curious, critical person who works in a meatpacking plant in nineteenth-century Argentina - or whatever. But their common qualities also mean that they're not just going to blindly and automatically produce what's given to them, either. They're going to, ideally, look at a wide array of what's in front of them and produce something new out of it. And we need this as a species a lot more than we need people who can repeat a slogan - even a *correct* slogan - for a teacher before going on to repeat another slogan for another teacher.