Abstract

question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, is a question that is vague and, in the final analysis, only useful as a scare-tactic. It may sound straightforward, but it quickly dissolves into a variety of more specific possible interpretations: Should a teacher insist that students adopt in their writing a particular political position under threat of failure; should a teacher encourage students to adopt a particular political position; should a teacher argue for a particular political position in class; should a teacher expose students to political positions that are contrary to those the students already hold; should a teacher encourage or permit students to express any and all of their beliefs and opinions, even those that other students might find offensive; should a teacher show students how to critically examine beliefs, political or otherwise, and ask students to critically examine their own beliefs; should a teacher raise the possibility that the beliefs we have come to hold are interconnected and symbolically charged in ways that may prevent us from straightforwardly examining them; should a teacher design assignments around controversial political issues and insist that students engage (e.g., argue with others and defend their own position); should a teacher avoid all references to specific political issues and train students to write clear, grammatically correct prose? And, of course, there are many other ways of hearing the question. If we are to resist the question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, then, in favor of a question or questions that bring out more clearly what is at stake for us in the discussion of politics in the classroom, we may want to begin with a closer examination of the relationship between educational and political aims-which is precisely the direction we seem to be going in, if articles such as Patricia Bizzell's The of Virtue, Richard Marius's Politics in the Classroom, Louise Wetherbee Phelps', A Constrained Vision of the Writing Classroom, Donald Lazere's Teaching