It's not necessarily a terrible thing. “West Baltimore can be a crushing place to be a Black teen,” Anderson writes. Advocating for My Students Requires Being Political on My Own Time, If You're a Politician and Don't Have Education at the Forefront, Then You're Part of the Problem, Donald Trump Will Never Give Us the Smart, Nuanced Conversation We Need About Going Back to School. For this reason, there is tremendous responsibility in voting and civic engagement, which requires that individuals do their homework, so to speak. She got the impression that many of them wanted to leave the turmoil of politics outside. Do politics belong in the classroom at all, or should schools be safe havens from never-ending partisan battles? Are there issues that are, or should be, completely off the table? If you get the humor that I just said or, "Do you agree with me that that politician's a big idiot?" You promise to let me finish?” It would not be the first time a student had a thought that I disagreed with. Hess: Absolutely. So we don't believe that there is one right answer to this. With students taking on issues – like smoking – that are political but not too political. At the same time, democracies allow us, when we're in the public sphere, to walk out of a discussion if we don't like what's happening or if we're being offended. Lopez continued to think about these incidents, wondering how the BC students would have felt in the Harvard classroom, where there was an assumption that everyone thought the same way about the election results. Education Post is the flagship platform of brightbeam, a network of education activists demanding a better education and a brighter future for every child. Students are the country’s future voters, so it would be very valuable to have them be well-informed on current political news. If you get the humor that I just said or, "Do you agree with me that that politician's a big idiot?" Students not surprisingly report that they don't like being pushed. In classes where there's a lot of sameness, the first thing we learned is that, though it might appear that there's a lot of sameness, there's always some difference. Hess: You're absolutely right, there are a number of schools that encourage students to get involved in political campaigns, but they tend to be political campaigns that really aren't very controversial. I am only slightly embarrassed to say that in search of insight and inspiration, I had watched several Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman movies in the weeks leading up to that day. At 5:30 a.m., I drove from the cheap apartment I shared … Sometimes it seems there's a belief that schools should be political ... sort of.