[baddox]

> Consider current-day North Korea, Venezuela, or countless Middle-Eastern countries (which regulate education as well as the internet)

Doesn't the United States also regulate education and the Internet, and particularly the former? It seems like you're still likely to get labelled a kooky conspiracy theorist if you claim that modern Western governments actively engage in blatant propaganda campaigns, but it's considered "obvious" that other countries (either in the past or other parts of the world) do so.

[ender7]

US education has both private and public aspects. Private schools are, surprisingly, almost unregulated in terms of the content that they must teach (high school students are required to take one class in American History).

Public education is administered at the county level (if you can believe it). States have a decent amount to say with regards to what schools teach; the federal government does not. This system is not great for a variety of reasons (primarily the fact that education quality varies astronomically from county to county), but it does mean that "propaganda in schools" is hard to effect from a centralized location.

[baddox]

I haven't done a lot of research, but from the few public school teachers I know personally, I glean that a lot of state and federal public school "regulation" is not of the explicit legal type, but rather takes the form of pressure from conditional subsidies.

[pflats]

States set their own educational requirements. The federal government has no "hard" power there, but it has a big pile of money, lots of ideas, and likes to promote the latter with the former.

[guscost]

> "propaganda in schools" is hard to effect from a centralized location.

What do you think of the new "common core" standards?

[bmelton]

> Public education is administered at the county level

Admitting that as being partially true, and/or not wanting to quibble over where it isn't, it's worth pointing out that will be a fallacy should Common Core become widely adopted.

It's also worth noting that public schools have been used for indoctrination for a very long time now. You'd have been hard-pressed to find a college grad in the early thirties who believed that the government had the Constitutional authority to implement Obamacare, while you'd be hard-pressed to find one now that believed it didn't.

While much of that is attributable to the actual practice of legislation, and the past 80 years of precedent, education, particularly history, is continually being "updated" to reflect modern sentiment, and applies that to the distant past.