Educators should not strive for objectivity.

Thanks for joining the debate. My opponent made several points in the last round which I will address here. First, let me reiterate my position briefly. People complain that educators too often give their own point of view in the classroom and that their students therefore don't get a proper education because they aren't given "just the facts," but are instead indoctrinated by the biased views of their teacher or professor. The implicit assumption by those who adhere to the complaint above is that students would be better off if teachers stuck to just teaching the facts, and leaving their own personal opinions out of it. They also assume that failing to teach in this manner is akin to indoctrination. I claim the opposite. I claim that we ought to stop encouraging educators to strive for objectivity. Furthermore, I claim that indoctrination is more likely to occur under a guise of objectivity than subjectivity. Now, my opponent first brings up the point that simply stating what YOU believe is actually an OBJECTIVE statement. If I say "I believe the war in Iraq is wrong," I am not making a factual claim about the war in Iraq. I am not saying it IS wrong. I am making a statement about my beliefs and that statement is therefore an objective fact (or an objective lie if in fact I do not believe what I say I believe). Conversely, if I say "The war in Iraq is wrong," I am now making a subjective statement in the guise of objectivity. I am stating an opinion but making it seem like a fact. We'll come back to this. Next my opponent says there are lots of ways to at least get close to being objective, even though he agrees that true objectivity is impossible. He lists three such ways: 1) You can list the facts according to one group, and then according to another, and then according to another, and so on. Rebuttal: This is the way traditional education is supposed to work. For example, if one is teaching about government, one might first teach about Democracy, then Socialism, then Communism, then Fascism. The problem is that there is no way you can give a fair account of EVERY different point of view. Even worse, you can't even give a fair, accurate, and thorough account of ONE of these points of view. Most of the facts are going to be left out. That means that whatever facts you share in the classroom are ones that have been CHOSEN (either by you or by the textbook's author or by some other unseen "educator") to emphasize. This is a HIDDEN bias. It is EXACTLY the same as someone saying "These facts are important." Now go back to my opponent's definition of objectivity and subjectivity. In order to be up front, it is necessary for an educator to say "It seems to me that these facts are important." But this is never done in a classroom. Furthermore, it CAN NEVER be done. It's impossible. It's even worse for the facts that are supposedly not important. There are countless facts and opinions by countless groups and factions that, because of time restraints, can not be expounded upon in the classroom. Those facts are relatively unimportant. But unimportant to WHOM?? This is another HIDDEN bias. Students walk away thinking they know what is important when it comes to governments, but they have only gotten a tiny fraction of the argument. They have only heard about a few different points of view when there are in fact countless different points of view. Imagine taking a class on religion and only being taught about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. If you did not know much about religion before, you would leave the class not even realizing that there are billions of Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of countless other religions in the world. You would believe that only these three religions are important and later, when someone approaches you wanting to discuss Buddhism, you will listen politely but "know" inside that Buddhism is not one of the important religions. 2) You can give your own opinions on the facts, as long as you say they are your opinions and not try to pass them on as facts. Rebuttal: This is not really a rebuttal because this is precisely what my position is. This is what I advocate as an educator's responsibility. 3) You can hold a debate between different "factions" and supposedly the truth come out through such a debate. Rebuttal: See the rebuttal for #1. Now, my opponent's second objection is not really an objection: "But let's look at the alternative: not striving for the objectivity goal. Will that prevent bias? Or even reduce it? Certainly not. They can still go around dictating their opinions as facts and there is no reason why they would be any easier to detect." First, it seems that my opponent believes that I am arguing that we ought to prevent bias when actually I am arguing the opposite. I am saying that since we can not prevent bias, we must make sure that our biases are out in the open. Instead of attempting to cover every possible point of view (something which is totally and absolutely impossible) we should simply put forth our OWN point of view, explaining ahead of time that it is our own, and challenging students to argue against it and thereby come up with THEIR OWN point of view. Education should not be about getting a bunch of facts spewed at us and then having us regurgitate those facts on demand. It should be about developing our critical thinking skills and learning how to think for ourselves. We should not treat students as if they were shoppers; as if each valid point of view can be contained in a cereal box and the student can just browse the isle and pick the cereal they like. There are an INFINITE number of ways to make breakfast and you can't compartmentalize a small subset of them and pretend these are the only important ones. That leads to indoctrination. One day that one of those students will see someone crack open an egg instead of dish out some cereal and the student will be dumbfounded! "What the heck is that!?!? That's not BREAKFAST!" Instead, students should be treated like apprentice chefs. Show them how to COOK! But when you show someone how to cook, you can only show them how YOU do it. Tell them there are lots of different ways to do it, but this is your way. It may not be the best. They should go find other chefs after they learn when they can from you. Now the student will not be surprised when another chef poaches their eggs instead of scrambles them. They knew all the time that there were different ways to cook an egg, or to cook anything. They will be better able to accept and integrate new facts into their point of view. They will have a more open mind. Which is exactly what we want students to get out of an education, right? So, to summarize, it is true that you can state your opinion while still maintaining objectivity. This is exactly what I am advocating, just said in a different way. Educators should be encouraged to put forth their own point of view as long as they make it clear that is what they are doing and as long as they don't discourage students from challenging that point of view. Trying to teach by giving the opinions of various groups is doomed to failure because you can never list all the facts according to a single group (you can never say everything there is to say about Christianity, for example) and you can never give enough time to every valid group (you can't cover every single religion in a class on religion, for example). Therefore, attempting to do so will always introduce hidden bias into the classroom. You will always be telling students which facts are unimportant (the ones you didn't mention) and which facts are important (the ones you did). You will never be preceding these statements with phrases like "According to me," or "It seems to me," or "In my opinion," thereby failing the test for objectivity according to my opponent's own definition. Thank you.