Politics is overwhelming, especially for students. It’s an umbrella term that covers everything from local zoning laws in Portsmouth to billion-dollar multinational trade contracts. Trying to stay perfectly informed requires parsing an overwhelming amount of data, and, unlike other concepts like trigonometry, not every thesis produces a straightforward, provable answer—consensus is rare. 

For many students, the extent of their political engagement is as follows: They walk into school having read three headlines on their phone, none of which they can fully parse, let alone contextualize. They spend the next seven hours learning how to balance a chemical equation, write in prose, and conjugate a verb. At no point does anyone teach them how to read the news.

This is not simply an oversight; it is a problem that plagues the country as a whole—the product of a decades-long crusade against anything that resembles the P-word in classrooms. Such an aversion does not serve students. It has instead resulted in a generation fluent in algebra but illiterate in the system that governs their lives.

The myth of the ‘apolitical’ classroom

Ask any administrator why a school should be free from politics, and they will tell you some version of “it’s too divisive.” A school should be as non-partisan and politically neutral as possible to raise the next generation of ideologically diverse free thinkers. But taking this stance is political in and of itself. By remaining neutral, schools affirm the stances of the current administration, becoming an extension of their platform.

If this seems like a stretch, consider the experiences of transgender students in places such as Texas or Florida, which have both heavily restricted or outright banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. If private schools, as well, choose to operate under a similar code of silence out of fear of taking a stand, their students are alienated. Thus, the school has, by nature, chosen a side.

Historically, marginalized groups founded private schools to escape persecution. Following major slave rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries, Southern states enacted a series of overtly racist anti-literacy laws that made it a crime to teach both free and enslaved Black people to read or write. These laws served to fortify the existing class system, which designated Black people to the subjugated and hyper-exploited “planter” class. In response, enslaved communities built out a vast, hidden educational network. Literate African Americans operated secret schools in their homes, often under the cover of night, which proved themselves indispensable tools for liberation, allowing enslaved people to forge travel passes, and paved the way towards the end of American chattel slavery.

Taking a stand in the face of such overt bigotry was clearly the right thing to do, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone claiming the contrary. Yet today, forced positions of centrism risk moral failure. To pretend that it is in a private school’s best interest to remain “neutral,” one would have to ignore the implicit bias that neutrality carries, let alone the role these schools played in changing the mind of a nation.

Among young adults, 70% say they get political news incidentally, and nearly 40% those aged 18–29 report regularly getting news from social media influencers, with 65% saying it shaped their understanding of current events and civic issues. These social media platforms have no editorial standards or accountability, and into that vacuum walks an algorithm with zero interest in whether a sixteen-year-old understands the difference between a sanction and a blockade, or between a tariff and a tax.

If schools won't teach political literacy, and the internet won't either, the only institutions left to do it are the ones students build themselves. Thus, the Centurion.

Biases are not the enemy of truth—when disclosed

Our editorial policy lays it out quite plainly: publications should not shy away from biases. We believe that the media does not and should not have the responsibility to report every perspective.

This may need some explanation. I believe I put it best when outlining our editorial policy, and this is a direct excerpt from it: 

The stories from children and families being held ‘incommunicado’ by our country’s immigration enforcement agencies, unable to communicate with family members or retain attorneys before deportation, carry a much heavier moral weight than that of the privileged upper one percent. […] A self-respecting publication will not allow just anyone to write an op-ed, and nor should they. Someone who believes in the Great Replacement does not deserve a megaphone, and anyone who runs a half-decent magazine (like this one) wouldn’t grant them one. They will instead attempt to mold public discourse into something that benefits us all, and that is where an editorial bias will start to peek through.

Instead of forced centrism, we favor much more valuable: transparency. Compare that to the alternative model (and we don't have to look far for one): The Spoke, the Wheeler School’s existing paper. It does exactly what most student publications are trained to do: keep it safe. A story on the war against undocumented immigrants sits at the same temperature as an update on the construction of the Farm’s new pool. This style of reporting isn’t “balanced,” and it insults both stories in the process. It doesn’t even serve the reader—it hurts them. A newspaper’s failure to take a stand teaches its audience that the job of journalism is to describe the world without ever rendering a judgment about it.

Political literacy doesn't mean teaching students what to think. It means giving them the tools, the vocabulary, and the practice to figure out how to think—and then trusting them enough to argue back.

Why authentic student journalism matters

Independent journalism matters because it is accountable to its readers, not advertisers and shareholders. Even more important is student journalism, the only form of journalism written by people who are simultaneously its subjects. Yes, this is important because it serves as an extension of the student body when reporting on changes at ground zero, like that of the curriculum or disciplinary system, but where it really shines is in accurately representing the view of the next generation on topics at a global scale.

Policy changes affect everyone, but especially us sub-20s. While we may not be paying taxes yet, we are the ones who are tasked with amassing enough general world knowledge to vote in those short three years between ages fifteen and eighteen, when people start becoming civically engaged. If the Wheeler School had an engaged enough community to not only interact with these topics but be empowered enough to comment on them before they even leave high school, it would certainly be a good sign that they’re building a skill that will outlast every standardized test they ever take: political literacy—one that cannot be taught from a textbook that was approved precisely because it has none.

What we’re asking

We're not asking the school to endorse polarizing conclusions. We're asking for the freedom to disclose our perspective rather than disguise it, and the trust that our classmates are capable of encountering an argument they disagree with and surviving it.

If a Turning Point USA chapter can operate on campus with the administration's blessing, a little student-led left-wing advocacy is certainly not going to tip the scales.