Ideology and bias
Politics and ideology is a fraught topic, especially for teachers who must remain politically neutral from an ethical perspective. Therefore, in order to illustrate the difference between left and right wing ideology, we would like you to research it yourself. Here are a few links to get you started.
Why can't you just look at one source? Because every media product has an ideological bias. I have not vetted these sites for ideological bias, so as always with internet sources, precede with caution.
Wikipedia entry
Diffen.com - left and right wing
Fact/Myth - the left/right political spectrum explained
Information Is Beautiful - left vs right (The website in general is excellent, so bookmark it)
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| This image is absolute nonsense, and is an example of the confusion that surrounds discussions of political ideology. Make sure to assess everything you see or hear in the media for political bias! |
What political ideology do you have?
One way of discovering your political ideological perspective is to complete a simple political spectrum quiz. There are several issues with this process. Firstly, you need to understand several concepts such as unionisation, the free market, globalisation and taxation. These are concepts you should definitely make yourself familiar with, but you may have little actual first-hand experience of taxation and marriage, since you are teenagers. Secondly, these quizzes are dry as hell. There's no context or examples given. But give it a go anyway.
A more useful test is one that tells you how your political ideology matches up to party political manifestos. One common complaint among young people is that they don't know enough about politics to vote. This can be solved right now by completing this quiz on I Side With. It works better if you choose more responses and to answer more questions. After you get your results, make sure to research the political parties that you most closely match with.