Conflicts in Philosophies

Most recently in history, we started a new unit about ideologies.  We focused on three; conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism.  The essential question that we focused on answering was, "What were the major political ideologies of the 19th century and how did they influence social and political action?"  The first activity that we did in class was developing our own definitions for each ideology.  After we came up with own definitions, we then discussed them as a class, and then fine-tuned our definitions.  Afterwards, were then split into six different groups and each group was given either conservatism, liberalism, or nationalism to further study.  My group received conservatism.  Each group then read about their specific ideology and created a one minute video that were presented to the class.  After both groups for the same ideology presented, we as a class came up with our own definitions for that ideology.  After the presentations were complete, we then voted on the best video for each category; my group won for conservatism.  I feel that by completing this project and listening and watching the other groups present, I gained a better understanding of conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism.

My group was assigned the ideology, conservatism and we decided to make a common craft for our presentation.  After reading the document on this topic, we defined conservatism as keeping the traditional political structures such as the church, education, and government system.  To better explain this definition we included pictures of a church, books, pencil, and a king.  Conservatives wanted to preserve the traditional political systems because they were time tested.  We included a Christmas tree, to make a connection between family's traditions during the holidays and conservatives beliefs that tradition should be resorted.  Conservatives wanted to keep the original system of monarchy, but many citizens were against this and wanted a revolution.  However, after the devastation of the French Revolution, reform did not appeal to conservatives.  During this part of our video we included a king and many citizens beneath him to show the social ladder in a monarchy; the king has the most power while citizens are ignored.  Most conservatives came from aristocracy and to demonstrate this we drew a social pyramid.  Conservatives took action on social systems by wanting to recreate the monarchy and promote education.  They took action upon political systems in the 19th century by allowing the church to have direct influence in the government.

This is a screenshot from a part in our common craft video.  At this point in the video we are discussing how conservatives wanted to restore the monarchy; hence why we drew a king.

After watching the groups that were assigned liberalism present their project, we as class defined this ideology.  Our definition for liberalism was when the middle class tells the monarchy to listen to what they have to say.  Liberals promoted what was best for the majority of the nation.  Although liberalism had probably the most open view out of the three ideologies, it did not include the poor or women.  Liberals took action on social systems by giving power to the middle class.  They took action upon political systems in the 19th century by promoting reform and encouraging the possibility of revolution; which would drastically change the government.  We then watched the videos that covered Nationalism and created a definition.  We defined Nationalism as when people in smaller counties unite to be the best nation possible.  People were bound together by shared language, culture, and history.  Nationals took action upon the social systems in the 19th century by wanting to combine countries together and took action upon political systems by sometimes declaring war against larger countries to hopefully gain more power.  Each of the three ideologies that we studied, which were conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism, all are very different approaches on how to run the government, but they had one thing in common; they all believed that their philosophy was the most logical.