A few years ago at Southridge High School in Beaverton, during an assembly featuring traditions from other countries, like Somali dance routines, a white student stood and raised a Nazi salute. Patrick M. Griffin, a teacher, said he quickly pulled the student out of the auditorium and explained why that was wrong.

Nazi symbols are easy to spot, but more subtle references drawn from white power ideology also surface, like students asking to organize a white student union.

After getting the tool kit from Western States, Mr. Griffin started incorporating some of its suggestions into his advanced history classes. He is using the nationalist struggles in Germany from 200 years ago to examine modern white nationalism.

The manual explains how to argue against the most common defenses of white supremacist ideology, and Mr. Griffin has braided that into discussions.

But the question of its effectiveness is a source of debate.

Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent and a terrorism expert, said that he supported teaching tolerance, but that there was no proof prevention programs work. “The idea of these programs was that if they could suppress the bad ideas there would be less violence, but there’s no evidence that this is true,” he said in an email.

When it comes to radicalization, white adolescent males are considered particularly vulnerable.

Max W. Thayer, 18, a senior at Southridge, said he recognized how classmates can get drawn into extreme material online, so he now speaks up if someone uses memes that push the boundaries too far. “If you are willing to post them publicly, you need to calm down and back off,” he said.