Propaganda.

[OnyxCollie]

94. "Education is teaching things that are true;

propaganda is teaching
things that are false. As a first comment
on this proposition, one is
tempted to repeat Pilate's question.
Yet the unpleasant connotation of the
term" propaganda" is due in considerable
measure to the notion that it is
synonymous with deception. Much
evidence to support this contention
can be advanced. Advertising propagandists
resist the establishment of
publicly administered tests and standards
by which their unsupported
claims can be measured. Medical
frauds flood print and air with meretricious
claims. Political and economic
quackery speed on winged feet over
every avenue of communication.

On the other hand, much that is
characterized as propaganda comprises
undeniable facts. Mr. Brisbane
points out the relative smallness of
our airplane defenses. Is this propaganda?
The conclusion that we should
immensely enhance our expenditures
on military and naval aircraft may be
argumentative, but it is not essen-
tially deception. The Junior Chamber
of Commerce urges that the use
of school buildings be denied to Communist
groups. Whether or not the
practice thus urged is sound public
policy is a matter of opinion, not fact.
Mr. Hearst (as Mr. Coolidge did in his
Delineator articles, when Vice-President)
declares that our colleges are
permeated with "reds." This may or
may not be a fact, according to the
definition given to the term "red."
What the facts mean, and what should
be done about them, if anything, are
matters of opinion.

It should be pointed out, moreover,
that not everything taught in the
schools can be definitely labeled as
fact. Perhaps the data of mathematics
are facts; yet the examples given
for solution in any given textbook of
arithmetic or algebra may-can, in
truth-scarcely escape embodying a
point of view concerning economic institutions.
A school reader containing
stories of the lives of great men
may inculcate Carlylean individualism;
a community civics may, on the
other hand, stress ideals of cooperation
and the importance of the group. A
high school economics text (if it be
several years old) may indicate that
the Federal Reserve Act made depressions
impossible or unlikely. Through
all the writing and teaching of the
social subjects runs inevitably a current
of interpretation. The spoils system
may be described as an evil that
should be abolished; it may be stated
that the Supreme Court interprets,
but never makes law; the Spanish-American
War may be referred to
as a humanitarian undertaking designed
to save Cubans from oppression.
These are not facts, but opinions
about facts."

Wooddy, C. H. (1935). Education and propaganda. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 179, p. 228, 229.

Your stance on rejecting propaganda does not surprise me.