The honors teacher (before honors was known as honors) I had in HS back in the late 50's, taught World History...She had taught in China before WWII, and was a topnotch teacher...didn't realize it at the time, but she really taught college level....except she involved everyone in her class. We were excited to learn BEFORE the bell rang, and stayed in our seats after the bell rang. She insisted we take a quarter of her propaganda class BEFORE she taught the World History class. Two things stuck with me after all these years. We took 10 national papers in class every day, like the WSJ, NYT, Chicago Trib, SFO Cronicle, etc. Also, we each had to take a paper at home, and be prepared EVERY day to discuss it in front of our peers...we never knew who she would call on to do that, so we were prepared!
Two things were:
1) If the article had a name on the article, it belonged on the op-ed page, because it was someone's opinion, and NOT news.
2) We had to dissect the top headline article EVERY day of class....took out EVERY adjective and EVERY adverb out of the article. We could very soon see where the article was biased or slanted, and learned which papers did that more often than the rest.....
Try it someday. Teach your kids those simple things. Soon, they will enjoy seeing various articles, in various papers, or in sound media....
In those years, it was NO where as biased as it is today.
For those who don't agree....go to the library, pull out a few national papers for a certain date, and try it yourselves. |
