‘Teaching Students to Think for Themselves’ Starts with Political Self-Awareness

Photo by Shubham Sharan on Unsplash

My nomination for the most predictable platitude invoked by university professors when describing the essence of their job is “teaching students to think for themselves.”

During my 26 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was sometimes accused of politicizing the classroom, I repeated that many times, not as a dodge but because I believed it’s the right goal.

As with many platitudes, the problem isn’t that it’s incorrect but inadequate. Teaching “critical-thinking skills” is at the heart of good teaching, but that phrase doesn’t offer much guidance on how to get the job done, especially in the social sciences and humanities. (I taught in a journalism school, which typically are a mix of those two traditions.)

I never met a professor—left, right, or center—who thought the job was to propagandize students, to push a particular belief system. But every professor makes decisions about topics covered, readings assigned, and the direction of class discussions in the limited time available—all of which require judgments that inevitability reflect a way of seeing the world. Call it a framework of analysis, a worldview, an ideology—no one understands human affairs in purely objective fashion, without assumptions about how the world works.

In short: Teaching is not politics but there’s always an underlying politics to teaching about human affairs, because there’s always a politics to living. By politics, I don’t mean partisan battles but rather competing claims about human nature, how to distribute power, what constitutes a good society. In that sense, there’s a politics to everything people do, whether stated or unacknowledged. The question is whether we can make a good case for the choices we make, which inevitably will be politically inflected.

As an example, I want to explain a lesson I used for in my Media Law and Ethics class that illustrates why no teaching is truly apolitical.

I started with widely accepted truisms. (1) The primary role of journalism in a democratic society is to provide information and analysis people need to participate in self-governance. (2) One of the most consequential choices a government can make is going to war, a time when citizens need especially fearless reporting. (3) In a society based on the rule of law—the idea that rules apply uniformly to everyone, including the wealthy and powerful—going to war should proceed lawfully.

I used the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as a case study. Was that invasion lawful? Did journalists provide citizens with the information needed to understand that question?

First, I walked students through the relevant international and domestic law.

The UN Charter authorizes a state to go to war under two conditions: A collective security action authorized by the UN Security Council, or self-defense when facing an “armed attack.” When the US military invaded Iraq on March 20, there was no Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force and Iraq had not attacked the United States. US officials claimed that previous Security Council resolutions implicitly granted the right to go to war, a claim that was rejected by most experts and almost everyone outside the United States. The United States’ unsuccessful attempt to pass a new resolution to authorize military action in February suggested that officials knew that existing resolutions weren’t adequate.

Next, I pointed out that many war proponents argued that the invasion was legal because in 2002 the US Congress had approved a resolution to authorize the use of military force against Iraq and that the United States should not be constrained by international law. But the United States ratified the UN Charter, which has the force of a treaty, and Article VI of the US Constitution makes all treaties “the supreme Law of the Land.” So, a violation of the charter is not simply a question of international law.

Most of the students in the class said that my lecture was the first time they had heard this kind of analysis. That wasn’t surprising, since there was little coverage of these issues in the US news media during the run-up to the war. Should journalists have written more, and more detailed, stories about the legal status of an invasion? Students agreed they should have, although some argued that it was understandable that journalists backed off in the post-9/11 political climate. I agreed, but that’s an explanation not a defense.

So, had journalists failed to provide citizens with the information and analysis they needed to participate in a democratic debate about going to war? Was that an ethical failure? I encouraged students to decide for themselves, making it clear I wasn’t going to test them about a “right” answer.

After the invasion, it’s not surprising that journalists avoided the question. If the US invasion had been illegal, then it constituted what under the Nuremberg Principles is called a “crime against peace”: “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.” The crime was described by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which prosected Nazi officials, as the “supreme international crime.” Those principles don’t constitute a formal treaty, but they inform both international and US law, and are a moral benchmark for contemporary international relations.

Is it crazy to label the US invasion illegal? Many experts around the world reached the conclusion that it was unlawful, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who reluctantly acknowledged that in an interview with journalists—in the UK. That story forced coverage in US papers, where US journalists treated it as a he-said/she-said controversy, implying that it couldn’t be resolved. Was that good journalism, airing different points of view? Or was it an evasion of responsibility by turning factual questions that journalists could answer into dueling opinions?

A necessary digression: Discussing this in a class today would raise questions about the Trump administration’s recent sea and land attacks on Venezuela. I would proceed in much the same way as with the Iraq example. The obvious difference is that Trump does not feign concern about how laws, domestic or international, constrain executive action.

Back to our subject, how professors can teach critical thinking without imposing their own views on students. Was this lesson an example of teaching critical thinking or inappropriately politicizing the classroom?

I was familiar with this legal analysis because of my work in the antiwar movement, and some might argue that I was forcing my point of view on students under the guise of an exploration of journalistic ethics. But the question isn’t how I learned of the critique but whether it was a helpful illustration of the pressure on journalists to “rally around the flag” in times of war. Were the facts I presented accurate? Were the legal principles and precedents I presented applicable? Did the case study raise an important question? I believe the answer to all three questions is yes.

But a deeper point is important. What of the many professors teaching similar classes who didn’t raise these issues? Were they inappropriately politicizing the classroom by avoiding such questions? If my antiwar activities led me to include this lesson, and that’s political, then weren’t professors who ignored such a lesson also political in the same sense?

Teaching isn’t politics, but there is always a politics to teaching. I believe that the deployment of the US military should conform to international and domestic law. Others disagree. How professors present the legality of the US invasion of Iraq is no doubt influenced by their assessment. But labeling one side political because it emerges from critique while pretending that the other side is neutral because it embraces the conventional wisdom is itself a political act. There’s no escape from making judgments that are, in some sense, political.

My lesson did a good job of teaching students to think critically. The conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, of course, but it’s wrong often enough that reflexively adopting it is dangerous. Challenging the assumptions of the dominant culture is crucial, especially in a journalism class.

Outside of the classroom, I was politically active for most of my time at UT-Ausin and sometimes ended up in the news because of that activity, especially after 9/11 when I was the subject of intense criticism for my antiwar writing. But I do not think my political activities outside the classroom made me a bad teacher. I was aware of the scrutiny I was under and reminded students that they didn’t have to agree with me, always trying to anticipate objections to points I made and discuss them in class.

My argument: Being self-aware of how my framework for understanding the world could influence my teaching made me a better teacher. Hiding my politics, from students or myself, would have been a mistake.

I know my position isn’t universally embraced. I was reminded of that one night at a dinner for professors who had won the University of Texas System’s Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. (Yes, that’s a not-so-subtle way of pointing out that I won teaching awards, hoping skeptical readers might take me seriously.)

The group at my table was discussing politics in the classroom, back in 2014 when the subject wasn’t quite as contentious as today. A political science professor said that he worked hard to hide his views, bragging that “my students don’t know how I vote.” That’s a common claim, almost always made with pride, and others at the table nodded in support. I said that I understood his point but that I didn’t always try to hide my views. “How can students evaluate our choices about how to present material if we hide our approach to politics?” I asked. Wouldn’t it be better if we were up front about our own framework of analysis, worldview, ideology? When we do that, it’s likely students could make a good guess at how we voted, but there’s no harm in that. We expect researchers to disclose the sources of funding so we can assess whether money might have influenced a study. Shouldn’t the same principle apply in the classroom regarding ideology?

I respect that political scientist’s point of view; reasonable people can disagree. We didn’t reach a consensus around the table that night, but I worry that the charge that a professor inappropriately politicizes the classroom is too often a weapon designed to impose conformity. That demand for conformity can come from any ideological camp, and it should be resisted whenever it shuts down critical thinking.

Yes, of course, I agree we shouldn’t tell students what to think. But if we really want them to think for themselves, we should be honest with students about not only what we believe but how we came to believe it.

---

Robert Jensen’s new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, will be published by Blue Ear Books in 2026. He is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024), and coauthor with Wes Jackson of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). More information at

https://robertwjensen.org/

To subscribe to his mailing list, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html.