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.
Students, moreover, should treat everything they encounter as a text. 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.
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.