The difference between opinion and ideology

While I agree, I had a stats teacher who was super liberal and went on about taxing the super wealthy at 90 percent and all that jazz which is....yanno, cool and all, but not sure why it had to come up in stats

So in the late 1800's/early 1900's it would have been appropriate for a school teacher to expose their students to their ideological support for the suffragette movement? Or in the early 20th century to expose their students to their ideological support for the civil rights movement? Or in the early 1800's to expose their students to their ideological support for the emancipation movement?

I assume from the facepalm that it means @Lanzman has never had to do any teaching, because vaguely explaining idealised concepts without any connection to how they actually apply to the real world is basically as good as not explaining them at all.

Are you familiar with the writings of Jeremy Bentham on things like gender equality and the rights of homosexuals? In the 18th Century, he was in favor of giving full equality to women and legalizing homosexuality. He was also so afraid of public reaction about his ideas that many of them were not published in his lifetime. Can't imagine what would have happened if someone had tried to espouse those ideas when the Founders were drafting the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Lots of them thought that slavery was a bad idea but were unwilling to give up their slaves or sign a document advocating for the end of it. Can't imagine them even considering the idea of gay rights. They'd probably tarred and feathered anyone for even hinting at it.

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

I'd be very upset if I wasn't aware of my history teachers ideology. If I read a book or a newspaper I'm always careful to understand the writers potential biases so that I can account for them. Why should a teacher be any different?

Exactly. Do you think this is true in the lower grades as well though? I'm not sure. I don't think a 4th or 5th grader has enough experience to understand biases.

Probably not, but it shouldn't be hidden from them or any pretence made that it doesn't exist.

Which is another reason to not do home schooling. let them experience someone else's bias and form their own.

The problem with what you are suggesting is that the Founders founded this country based on ideals, but today's politicians, as well as armchair politicians, attempt to apply those ideals in realistic terms.

Idealism - and what, I think, the Founders wanted, was for us (US) to always strive to be better. to make the country better. to make the people better. to make the laws better.

Realism - what is being applied does not strive to be better. It strives to be best. and once that "best" is met, there is no reason to be better.

Stephen West describes this difference in one of his earlier podcasts (can't remember off the top of my head which one), but ... I think he was discussing idealism vs realism in reference to religion.

It should also be noted that the Founders lived in a world that was vastly different from our own. Their ideas may have been very progressive for their time, but they are horribly outdated and repressive by today's standards. "All men are created equal" is a very noble ideal, and one to which I am firmly attached. But did the Founders think the day would come when it would be taken literally, when blacks, whites, native Americans, and everyone else would actually be considered equal? Did they expect that one day a black man or, even more unthinkable, a black woman, would be president of the country? Almost certainly not. Despite everything, we have come a long way since their time.

That is why we must be careful when we speak of "the ideals of the Founding Fathers". Seen through the lens of today's world, their ideals are much more far-reaching, and vastly superior, to anything they would have ever imagined.

The big problem in American society today is that too many people want to apply "the ideals of the Founding Fathers" as those ideals were understood in the context of the time. But that can't work. That society was absolutely unacceptable by today's standards: slavery, women who had basically no rights, homosexuals who should be killed for their sin, and so on.

The Founding Fathers' vision aimed much higher than they knew. They saw a little bit of it, through the lens of their own time, with a strictly heirarchical society where bigotry was considered as normal, acceptable, and even inevitable. But we can take their ideals and "run with them" on the basis of all that has been accomplished since then. Instead of a police-state where would-be asylum-seekers are locked in cages and minorities are killed with impunity by the police for little or no reason, we need to build a world where everybody actually is equal. We need to interpret the intentions of the Founding Fathers in the light of the contributions of people who have come along since then, and who are every bit as great as they were, in terms of vision. For example, we need to understand "all men are created equal" in the light of Martin Luther King's tremendous "I have a dream" speech.

So even though it sounds so nice and admirable and American to speak of "the ideals of the Founding Fathers", we need to be sure we are applying those ideals to today's world, and not settling for the applications -- very progressive for the time but unbelievably repressive by today's standards -- they themselves were able to imagine.

I find this topic frustrating and based on a false presumption. There are no "ideals of the founding fathers" any more than there are "ideals of modern political leaders". They had different views, often at odds with each other. Which one(s) are any of you talking about?

Exactly. The ideals were that we should always be striving to be better.

Too many people want to stop and say "ok, we're best". and that limits the ability to be better.

No, this is why we understand the greatness of the founders. Despite the limitations of their circumstances and world-view, they crafted documents of governance of awesome scope and potential. They reached beyond the boundaries of their world and saw a future of hope.
And incidentally, most of the founders from the northern colonies would have included blacks, but they knew that had they pushed for it, there would have been no union. The southern colonies were dead-set against freeing slaves or manumission and would not have joined a union that proclaimed either. If they made a mistake, it was in compromising for the sake of union instead of pushing harder for what many of them knew was the right thing to do.

What I believe @Asyncritus' point is, and, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that what we have to be careful about is that their ideals are even more far-reaching than even today. We can't say "well, we've lived up to this, so we're done here". We have to always continue to look forward. We have to always try to be better.

Flashback to my 4-5th grade experiences: Catholic schools, nuns for teachers, and smack in the middle of McCarthyism. We were regaled daily - not just in social studies, but in every subject - with the Evils of Communism, and how the Russians were either going to invade or nuke us. The fact that the city scheduled regular Duck-and-Cover drills - air-raid sirens and the whole thing - made it convincing.

Oddly, though, once school let out for the day, a lot of us would blank on it, until the Cuban Missile Crisis. That would have been the fall of eighth grade. In addition to our prayers for the Holy Father and Vatican II, we had to pray for guidance for "our President" (JFK was Catholic) so that maybe we'd live to see our 13th birthdays.

Then there was the first-grade nun who had a thing about the jailing and torture of Catholic missionaries in China. Nothing like filling a five-year-old's head with horror stories.

Nothing but Seattle public school for me during my formative years in the 60s... I think it may have impacted me some.

I'm old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills as well. I think by the time I hit second grade we stopped doing them? That would have been . . . let's see . . . . . . 1967? Thereabouts? Yeah, anyway, you should have tried being active duty military in the 80s and watching Ivan's navy scooting about the world aiming nukes at us. Good times, good times. Of course, we had our own pointed back the other way, so I bet they had fun watching us, too.

No way. What paranoid part of the country did you go to elementary school? We had earthquake drills.

"Oh well, since the South want it I guess I've got no choice but to continue owning and trading slaves for the rest of my life" - George Washington