Do You Know Your Ideologies?

Last week in History class I started learning about ideologies. An ideology is a system of ideas and ideals. These ideologies include Liberalism, Conservatism, and Nationalism. The question that my class aimed to be able to answer at the end of the unit was, “What were the major political ideologies in the 19^th century and how did they influence social and political action?” We started exploring this question by reading articles about these ideologies. We then had to write a definition of the ideology and use it in a sentence. After sharing our sentences and definitions with the entire class we began a project where we created a one minute video about our assigned ideology. Each ideology had two groups that were creating their project about it, and the group which had the better project got candy as a reward.

 

Edmund Burke photograph used in our project http://transitionvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/edmund-burke.jpg

We used an app on the apple app store called Chatter Pixs to create our project. This app allows you to take a picture of someone and then have the person’s mouth move while you play a sound file. My group and I decided that using this app would create an informative and fun project. We were told to focus on conservatism. My group used a document that our teacher provided us with to get the information that we needed about conservatism.  We defined conservatism in our presentation as an ideology in which tradition is the only reliable guide to political and social action. We said that in the nineteenth century, conservatives liked monarchy because of the Church and aristocracy control. They were opposed to change, innovation, and reform because past events had linked these qualities and bloodshed together. Conservatives used the French Revolution to justify their ideas in the nineteenth century.

I got to learn about the other two ideologies from other groups’ projects. First, one of the groups presented their project about Liberalism. I learned that Liberalism is the idea that the government’s duty is to protect the rights of the people. Liberals in the nineteenth century believed in natural rights and they supported innovation and reform unlike Conservatives. Liberals also supported meritocracies. John Locke and Adam Smith were thought of as the forefathers of liberalism. A different group presented their project about nationalism. Nationalism is a nation which is a natural organic entity, which is bonded by customs history and shared language. Countries in the nineteenth century who used nationalism were made up of many small states. Nationalist countries did not like foreign rulers. This division made it very easy for invading countries to take land from those who believed in nationalism.

Unfortunately, my group and I didn’t win the competition for the best project, and we didn’t get any candy. Even though we didn’t win we still learned a lot about ideologies.