Who are the most influential people - positive and negative?
Posted by ImpressiveOrange1741@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 12 comments
I want to give a list of positive and negative influential people to my students.
I'm looking for well known negative influences- i.e. Russell Brand.
As well as lesser known good influences. People who our media should be shouting about but go below the radar.
Even_Bit2857@reddit
Imo I strongly recommend you focus on positive and negative content not "positive and negative influencers." The vast majority of people do a mixture of good and bad things and I really really don't think you should just be handing students a list of people you personally think are "good" and "bad" - that's really binary, absolutist, moralist and not good for developing critical thought.
Maybe you're planning to add more nuance that (in which case fair enough!) but I think it would be better to explain that things like e.g. bigotry are bad and then give examples of people who spread bigotry and emphasize that this is a bad thing they have done.
BernardBernouli@reddit
Malala Yousafzai
Nuthetes@reddit
Postive: As far as public faces go, Mark Hamil always seems a genuine good egg. He helped raise a shit tonne of money for Ukraine, and I never really hear anything bad about him.
Belsnickel7777@reddit
Is Russell Brand influential? If we're going off comedy, someone like Ricky Gervais, whatever anyone thinks of him, his work with Stephen Merchant when they created the Office is far more influential
No_Actuary9100@reddit
Bear Grylls seems like a positive influence
Upbeat_Branch_4231@reddit
Mark Carney, I may have spelled his name wrong, but the PM of Canada. He's the most influential politician of the 21st century.
RiverGlittering@reddit
Politicians are one of the places OP should go.
Teachers are legally required to be politically impartial with their education. Labelling a PM a good or bad influence may get them into a bit of a mess. Unless the politician is famous for war crimes or something, nobody will say that Hitler wasn't a bad influence for example.
Puzzledandhangry@reddit
If you’re asking on reddit you probably shouldn’t be a teacher.
Truewit_@reddit
This is bait to start a conversation about lefty educators.
aarontbarratt@reddit
Negative:
yourefunny@reddit
The people in front of the cameras are far less influential than the people behind the cameras. I think your students would really benefit from understanding that media corporations are owned by some very nasty people who have their own interests at heart. Robert Murdock and The Rothermere family for example.
As well as that, big tech being owned and orchestrated by some very bad people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, has horribly negative impacts one what we and your students are exposed to.
On a positive note Katharine Viner is seen as pretty decent. She runs the Guardian which is subjectively a great news paper doing real hard hitting investigations and seen as good journalism. Ian Hislop is the editor of the Private Eye and has been for 40 years or so. Private Eye is a great magazine that tries to hold those in power to account. For example they were holding the torch of the Post Office injustice for years.
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