Re teaching facts, well, you do your best. You have to start sometime. I suspect the word “fact” is what you’re reacting to. Well, call them purported facts. We can’t do better than what we ascertain to be facts after conscientious research and formulation. If we don’t teach that, then we don’t teach any declarative knowledge at all, leaving children in ignorance. If it comes down to ignorance vs. a large belief system that is 98% accurate, I’ll go with the latter.

However, I would be careful of teaching certain “facts” as much of what we learn could be opinion rather than fact and I would not like to influence my child with “facts” which are not true. I am not even going to put examples of this here – I am sure everyone can think up their own versions or even think of things they themselves have had to relearn due to opinions changing.

I think some people are a lot better at this than others. I also think that it can be trained. It is possible that at some level and to some degree, we cannot escape our bias. But a really good scholar, and this is true of lawyers as well, is capable of identifying all of the assumptions that he makes that other people are capable of calling into question.

All too often I found, when managing Nupedia, Wikipedia, and Citizendium, that people would come up with what were essentially excuses for thinking they could not write more neutrally. I think they simply have not been exposed to a certain kind of scholarship enough.

Jay, if you think our zeitgeist is anything but abjectly statist, you haven’t got the first clue about what an anarcho-capitalist zeitgeist would look like. What is allegedly the most right-wing government in the world, that of the U.S., spends about 40% of the GDP–trillions of dollars. Forty percent. That is huge! And it is not by accident. Some part of the government is expected by most people, even many Republicans, either to have its heavy hand in, or absolutely control, almost every area of human life. And you call our zeitgeist “anarcho-capitalist”?

Scholars have never been neutral, and they have never been committed to neutrality. They take sides, and there is nothing wrong with taking sides. The world would be awfully boring if everyone was a “neutral,” and academia would be, too.

That said, one of the most striking facts about academia in the humanities and social sciences since about 1980 is how open its social and political bias is–so much so that it has become positively intolerant to anything else.

If anything, reflection on the viability of being a “neutral” in academe gives me some reason to think the very idea is, while perhaps not incoherent, then practically impossible. Three (but only three) main ways that academics propagate their biases include (1) topic selection, (2) adoption of whole elaborate systems of loaded terms, i.e., concepts that imply a whole complex set of controversial opinions, and (3) failure to recognize that the assumptions behind their fields are ultimately ideological and philosophical, and not so clearly amenable to empirical research. In the face of such habits, can we really expect many people to have the independence of mind to challenge or analyze the topics, vocabulary, and assumptions of the field?

No, sadly, mere neutrality about such things would be so difficult and requires such courage in the face of peer disapproval (and everything that it entails) that very few people would be able to pull it off.

In fact, there are plenty of studies that show being accurate counts *against* one professionally, versus being on the bandwagon for an ill-considered cause.