How would you handle this highschool Homework Assignment? [View All]

[Sparkly]

My daughter is in high school, and has a very young history teacher who she likes very much. However, he's given them a project to defend a particular president as the "best president ever." The difficulty is that the kids did not get to choose which president they get to defend. He did that by drawing names from a hat, and was delighted when my (outspokenly liberal) daughter got Reagan!

So her assignment is essentially to come up with reasons why Reagan was the best president ever, and to "find bad stuff about Clinton" to debate the student who's defending Clinton.

Okay, so she could learn to BS like a political hack from this assignment, but it's worse. Part of the grade is given for the "validity" of the points and facts made.

So she doesn't know how to do this assignment without lying, and she has to be truthful as part of the grade. I am not sure how to help her, and wonder if this is worth complaining to the teacher about or whether to let her fight this battle herself. I guess I could arm her with "facts" that can only sound cynical, such as "Reagan made people feel confident in the economy by pushing huge tax cuts; Clinton raised taxes on the top 2% -- oh sure, it helped start to pay down that debt Reagan exploded, but did people feel as happy and confident? Maybe not!"

Any ideas?