The difference between opinion and ideology

Ehhhhh, sometimes. Depends what you define as political ideology.

I don’t disagree, but I’d like to hear your reasoning.

The range of what counts as political ideology and what is just baseline goodness varies from every individual to the other.

As one example, as a teacher I have had a classroom where a student was trans. I treated that person according to their identity. To me that is just the correct way to behave, to others that is pandering to illness.

There are some who believe that the law should preference one religion over another. As a teacher to give every student equal time and consideration regardless of their religion would certainly suggest I don't share that ideology.

Having taught in a creative field, works that students would make and the work examples that teachers would show often built upon their views and experiences. In those situations to censor them and only show those which are ambiguous would be to do students a disservice.

I didn't run into any of that until I hit college. I changed teachers after the very first day. After that I did my homework on them before agreeing to take their course.

Didn't want to start a scrum in the meme thread, but I'd like to address this post:

Not quite certain what "did my homework" was intended to mean but, coupled with the meme:



it raises some questions.

To start, is it only political ideology @T.R feels triggered by? What about religious ideology?

Also, where is the line between opinion and indoctrination? (Oh, the stories I could tell about the latter!)

Are teachers expected to be androids just spouting the course material?

"We should spend X amount of money to build a park for kids", is political.

"Gay people don't deserve to exist", is not, and you can go fuck yourself.

Therefore, labeling the "gay people DO deserve to exist", person as "a liberal kook", makes you a pile of shit.

Got nothing to do with party affiliation, you're just garbage.

Interesting that the meme specifies "political ideology." Does this imply that whoever created the meme, not to mention the poster who subscribes to it, has no problem with religious ideology?

Oh, I knew one of my teacher's political ideology.
I was stuck in a study hall with him, and that made him free with his opinions somehow, and it was a bunch of soft-racism shit.
Bet TR would've lapped it up like chocolate syrup.

Didn't you have to wait till they gave you the home work to... Oh I see.

Correct on all counts.

The only ideology that should be espoused in a classroom is the one Quest mentions above, which are the ideals on which America was founded.

The term ideology is far too often abused, and I think this is one of the topics that can't be clarified without getting a grip on that. Ideology does not simply mean political agenda, partisanship, beliefs, or worldview. So fair warning: This is going to be one of those posts. You know the kind.

Ideology got its current meaning in 19th century idealistic and political philosophy. It is properly defined as "necessarily false consciousness".

Consciousness, in this tradition (basically Hegel) is reflective thought, i. e. thought about thought. So you might think that today is Monday; but you might also think about the fact that you are thinking about today being Monday, and that's consciousness.

If you think that today is Monday, but it's really Tuesday, your thought is false. If you think you think today is Monday, but you're really thinking something else, your consciousness is false.

How can your consciousness ever be false? For instance, much racism is ideological. Sometimes you think that race has nothing to do with what you are thinking, but in fact you have taken race into account without realising it. That's false consciousness.

How does that happen? One way is for you to have soaked up those ideas through the historical circumstances of your life. That's how false consciousness can end up the necessary result of your historical situation.

The first thing necessarily false consciousness is usually wrong about is that necessary connection. Ideology masquerades as idealism: it seduces you into thinking of some of your thoughts as independent of your circumstances and position, as "ideal", in ways they actually can't be. Sometimes, "nature" is used instead of "idea": "I'm not talking politics, I'm just considering some abstract ideas." turns into "I'm not talking politics, I'm just discussing some facts of nature."

The signature move of ideology is to pretend that some knowledge is not political. The demand that teachers should separate politics from teaching is a perfect example of a deeply ideological statement. It aims to protect current power structures by declaring them non-existent, only natural, or ideally true, when they are in fact specifically reflected in the historically grown political beliefs you bring to the table.

I would have to add that it depends on the subject supposed to be taught. It might be great a teacher in social studies is mentioning things like this. OTOH when your science and math teachers are doing it they are wasting time.

Back in the 70s, small town in middle america, the only political ideologies were the one's on which this country was founded. Then the Republicans decided that the best way to gain power was to scapegoat all of America's problems on liberals and now we are where we are.

So you are one of the idiots who like to distract the class with their opinion because the classwork is too hard for you. Teachers should have just put you in the corner with the dunce cap where you belonged so the rest of the class who paid money to learn facts and not the opinion of some dipshit right wing terrorista could go on with life. It is a classroom, and not your political soapbox skippy.

Whew. I think I need to go lie down.

You mean like the one that made slaves worth 3/5 of a person?

Pushing a political agenda strikes me as bad taste and leaves the professor open to claims of bias from students who can at least plausibly claim they were downgraded for not following his/her party line.
Anyway, the only undergraduate professor I had that proclaimed himself a socialist was in a history class. As far as I can tell it didn't make any difference in the way the class was taught and no one that I know of was downgraded for not having the "correct" opinions about anything. He made it clear that anyone was welcome to challenge his opinions but that they would need to bring some sort of argument or "theory" as he put it, to the table. If I recall correctly that was more in line with a general statement about discussions outside the class.
In grad school, I had a professor who saw everything through a lens of postmodernism. He was a genuinely nice man (lousy golfer...worse than me, but playing golf with professors was one of the things I liked about grad school versus undergrad.) but I never have really been able to grasp the concept of post-modernism, except that it seems to be a sort of finger wagging disapproval of the current state of society. I never have figured out what follows "post modernism". It also raises the question in my mind that since every era considers itself "modern", whether the next era was always "post modern"...er...am I making any sense?

@MikeH92467, you mention downgrading, and that's where the real issue lies. @Forbin doesn't mention whether his teacher's ramblings affected anyone's grades, but that seems to have been @T.R 's fear. Either that or early evidence of the confirmation bias he exhibits here.

It's not something I've ever encountered, although I can cite serious attempts at political indoctrination (as opposed to religious indoctrination, which was a given in Catholic schools) going back to first grade.

In public school in Mississippi in the early 60s there was a morning prayer from which Catholics and Jews were told to stand in the halls. In my Florida high school there was morning devotion that was overtly Christian broadcast over the PA system, which no one was asked if they wanted to listen to. We were also expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

As Mike pointed out, how do you classify that? The idea that it's good for people to own other people? The idea that women have no rights? The idea that the white man has a manifest destiny?

If not, then when did those things become bad to share? The moment the law moved away from them and they became politically incorrect?

Good Lord!! While we did have to recite the pledge of allegiance through elementary school, I was never subjected to the mandatory prayers or sermons over the PA.

This is where the line generally sits, and it's often vague, like the pornography rule that you'll know it when you see it.

Fwiw, when we had a federal election last year I made a point of reminding the students who were old enough to go and vote, and emphasized they should do so regardless of who they intended to vote for. On a few occasions students would get into loud classroom debates about which parties to vote for/against and if they went on more than a few moments I would shut them down saying they were welcome and indeed encouraged to have these debates after class, but I couldn't allow them to go on without giving the impression of endorsing them.

You are making sense, though those sensible questions would be answered in the first lesson of any course on post-modernism (it's not finger wagging but a proof that things don't have to be as they are, when many believe they do; it's not necessarily a chronological term but covers any thought that says, we used to think we are different from what we were=modern, but we were more like before than we realised; but if considered an epoch, it usually takes classical modernity, roughly 1890-WW2, as its point of departure and continues through to networked performative society).

What subject was your postgraduate work in, if you don't mind me asking?

Mass Communications with Journalism emphasis. But it does seem that there is a real air of disapproval from those who use the term. I remember the pundit David Gergen describing Bill Clinton as the "first post-modern president." The idea that basic philososphic questions such as right/wrong, good/evil are relative is certainly threatening to some people, but it just seems to me that the term is used by conservative-inclined people to dismiss the validity of someone questioning the accepted order of things.

Why the facepalm Lanz?

It's a fact that the political standards on those issues have changed from 1776 to 2020.

At one point there was political and public debate over whether slavery should exist.

At one point there was political and public debate over whether women should have the same rights as men.

At one point there was political and public debate over whether white people had a god given mandate to mould the world in their image.

So clearly at some point it would have been inappropriate for a teacher to give their view on those things in the classroom. At some other point it became appropriate to have a stance leaning one way on them. So when did that occur?

These aren't gotchya style questions, it's important to determine where these lines lie because they still continue to inform where the lines should be drawn in the present day and moving forward.

Because the underlying ideals have always been as Quest put them: freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy. That the founders' view of these ideals were a bit narrower than the current interpretation changes nothing.

Narrower? Don’t you mean “wrong”?
Claiming the founding fathers believed in the ideals of equality and human rights is like claiming ... vanilla ice cream tastes like chocolate.

Tell me how I’m wrong.

I don't think it's that cut and dry. Although the Founding Fathers didn't invent equality and human rights like we're sometimes led to believe, some of them really believed in these concepts. They rarely lived up to them, and some of their definitions of freedom and equality were very, very narrow... but still an improvement on what had come before. I wonder what people a few hundred years hence will think of our definitions of Human Rights and equality.