One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.

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AlotOfReading 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.

Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.

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Der_Einzige an hour ago | parent | next [-]

All of continental philosophy since at least Hegel is intellectual bankrupt and it is a miscarriage of education to seriously teach it as anything more than a footnote that needs to be left in the dustbin of history.

Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.

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Izikiel43 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way

The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.

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AlotOfReading 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.

But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.

To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.

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floren 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's philosophy, not catechism, you're not expected to leave the class believing everything you read.

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broof 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes that’s correct. We didn’t cover things such as Locke or Hume, Adam smith, etc…

Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later

	▲	AlotOfReading an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Bit of a shame that it didn't directly cover Marx. Many of Marx's works are reactions to and critiques of people like Adam Smith. I think Marx even calls him delusional at one point. Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.

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dfxm12 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...

	▲	ecshafer 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.

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patall 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.

But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.

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biophysboy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.