Every text is propaganda for something, whether the author intended it, or even realizes it, or not. Each text is propaganda for its own assumptions. "See Spot Run" is propaganda for dog ownership. The Jungle Book and Little House on the Prairie are fine stories so far as they go, but they have certain colonial assumptions baked in. To Kill A Mockingbird seems a fine anti-racism text -- but if the author, the viewpoint character, and the hero are all white, what kinds of (potentially racist?) assumptions are baked in that you might not get from a Black author writing a Black hero from a Black point of view? I encourage students to interrogate every text for everything it's bringing to the conversation -- and especially for what it's secretly smuggling into the conversation.
One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics, you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science.
The theory goes that if I teach critical literacy vis-à-vis classroom novels and stories to such an extent that it becomes second nature to the students, they will tend to apply it more broadly in their lives -- to what they encounter on TikTok or Twitch, in sports or music, on social media, when talking to their friends or family, in textbooks and even when I'm standing at the front of the room, telling them ostensible facts. Thereby, perhaps they might be forged more resistant to the depredations of the Algorithm showing them deliberate propaganda for worldviews which have, at best, been rejected by polite society. Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.
The idea, of course, is not for me to teach students what to think; the idea is that they get into the habit of thinking about these sorts of things at all.