A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

THE STRUCTURE AND PROCESSES OF THE MIND (cont.)

[Note:  this essay began with the last posting (8/30/16).  In order to understand the context for what follows, I suggest you click on to that entry by using the archival feature found on the right side of this page.]

With the overall explanatory remarks found in the last posting, hopefully we at least have a feel for the processing elements of thinking described and explained by cognitive psychology; that is, we have an idea of what this concern for processing knowledge entails.  But there is a backdrop to all of this of which an educator needs to be keenly aware.  That would be the genetically determined developmental aspect of our ability to process information and knowledge. 

I think the best way to describe this aspect is to delve directly into one of several models cognitivists have formulated to describe this longitudinal process.  Let me take this opportunity to point out that there is no physical component one can point to that houses these distinguishing features between brain and mind.  An MRI will not be able to detect that portion of the brain where the mind resides.  Yes, scanning devices can detect where in the brain certain types of thinking take place, but this is mostly speculative interpretations of neurological and blood flow changes that coincide when certain types of experiences take place.  But does this reflect where or what the mind is doing as opposed to some other physiological phenomenon?  Who knows?  But what we do know is that it is convenient to describe psychological functions and activities in the ways the last posting went about it.  And so it is with this developmental or growth component of the mind. 

We do know we develop in discernable ways and we do know we don’t learn how to do it.  It just takes place.  But studying the patterns that people tend to experience and by using some creativity, cognitive psychologists have developed models that trace the development over the years in which the process takes place.  I will in this posting share two of these models: that of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.

Probably the most famous one is the one provided by Jean Piaget – have you heard the name?  Piaget’s model gained notoriety in the US in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Like other such efforts, his model identifies stages that begin at birth and go on until death.  They are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operation stage, and the formal operation stage.

Let’s look briefly at how each stage manifests itself:
1) Sensorimotor stage (birth to two years of age) in which the young child learns to consciously react to surroundings, as opposed to reflexive reaction which characterizes his/her initial behavior.  Also, the infant to toddler period teaches the young one that things have permanence; if you store something, for example, it will be there in the future. 
2) Preoperational stage (two to seven years old) in which the child places conceptual or symbolic qualities onto things (clothes are for wearing; crayons are for coloring).  This conceptualization includes the rudimentary ability to attach attributes and categorization qualities to common sets of things. 
3) Concrete operation stage (seven to eleven years old) in which the child is beginning to make more complex and logical relationships among objects and even ideas.  The level of complexity is still relatively low, but complexity is beginning to characterize mental relationships as long as the child is dealing with familiar things or ideas.  So, for example, he or she can figure out, especially in the physical realm, reversibility and reciprocal relations in the physical world (water, if chilled sufficiently, will turn to ice, and ice, if heated, will turn to liquid and, if heated more, will evaporate or, in another conceptual relation, he/she understands that a long, thin glass can hold as much water as a short, wide one). 
4) Formal operation (11 years old to death) in which the person can begin and continue the ability to understand, apply, and develop ideas of ever more sophistication and complexity.  These ideas can, as the years and education advance, be of increasing abstraction.  This progression also leans toward the universal, as opposed to the parochial.  Learning no longer depends on direct experience but on knowledge derived from instruction and reading and other exposure to communication outlets.  The nature of the learning process takes on more formal forms such as the adoption of rules governing logical argumentation.

While these are the developmental stages identified by Piaget, an individual’s progression will be influenced by many factors.  Some are inborn, but many are environmental.  This reflects the nature/nurture debate which is still very much a part of scholarly and popular discussion over such matters.  “Nurture” factors include the quality of parent/child relations, the quality of household conversations including the topics family members address and the assumptions such discussions develop and promote, the quality of the schooling that a subject experiences, the opportunities presented (either planned for or occurring by chance), the presence and quality of any mentors a subject encounters, and the like.

The other developmental model I will review is one I have referred to in this blog several times.  That is the model offered by Lawrence Kohlberg.  Highly influenced by Piaget, Kohlberg developed a moral developmental model.  His model consists of the following: 
1) Pre-conventional level in which behavior is simply judged to be good or evil based on, first, whether it elicits punishment (observed as the bad) and then, whether it elicits rewards (observed as the good).  I still remember the first time my son confronted the bad at this level – he was not happy. 
2) Conventional level in which good and evil are dependent on what others (mostly parents) think of the child, as a person.  This is likely to take the form of, first, being considered nice (observed as the good) or considered not nice (observed as the bad) and then, later, whether the person lives by the rules (observed as the good) or does not act in accordance with the rules (observed as the bad). 
3)Post-conventional level in which ideals of morality are generally based, at least initially, on what other people feel or on perceptions of who or what has authority (parent, schools and churches, police, government officials, one’s own conscience).  This is followed by a concern or determination to obey contractual provisions (observed as the good) or not obey contractual provisions (observed as the bad) and then, at the highest level of moral thinking and feeling, abiding by one’s own accepted principles of morality (observed as the good) or not abiding by those principles (observed as the bad) and ultimately by one’s own principles of conscience which are self-defined principles or accepted, universal principles (such as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Again, the progression is toward the abstract and the universal.

Of course, not all of us get to the upper levels.  Often, the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are given as two individuals who made the complete progression as outlined by Kohlberg’s model.  One can either agree or disagree with these examples, but I am sure that it is generally accepted that only very few people will have advanced through these three stages or six hierarchical dimensions of moral thinking and living.

Other names associated with cognitive psychology are John Dewey (of course), Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky (an interesting example to look up), Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), and Daniel Goleman (emotional intelligence).  An offshoot of cognitive psychology is constructivism which focuses on the processes by which “knowledge” is formed.  The term, “construct,” which has been used extensively in this blog, is derived from this perspective.  Let me quote Ornstein and Hunkins on this view’s take about understanding the world:
Meaning is imposed on the world by those who reflect, those who think about the world.  Meaning does not exist in the world independent of us.  It is we who structure the world, as we construct reality so as to comprehend it.  In other words, learners do not simply “bank” knowledge from the external world into their memories. They do not receive understanding as a gift.  They do not arrive at knowing as a prize received for persistent practice.  Rather, they must engage in conjecture, question themselves and their views, contemplate projections of their held views, then formulate interpretations of the world shaped by their past experiences and interactions with the world.  They must bring into their cognitive processes their “world knowledge.”  They must draw on their perceptions of context, present and past.  Reflecting on contexts relevant to their learning results in the emergent formulation of understanding.[1]
Excuse the length of this citation, but I think that in relatively few words, its authors capture not only the essence of constructionism, but also all of cognitive psychology.  Before I was exposed to this fancy language, I realized that if you wanted students to learn something – whatever that meant – they had to reflect upon it.  Otherwise, it would not be much better than short-term memory.  Oh, there were those students with good memories who would retain the material for the weekly test and get their good grades.  In most schools, they are still the ones honored on the dean’s list and other designations.  But they are not necessarily the ones who later on will excel in the professional world.  It will be those students who learn to reflect or had at least an intuitive sense for what Ornstein and Hunkins describe above.

Let me end with an anecdote:  It came to be when I taught high school students that I got to know a young lady quite well.  She graduated from the high school where I taught back in the 1990s.  She was not my student but was dating another student to which I was quite close – a family connection.  She graduated with top honors, just about a straight A student.  She went on to matriculate in an undergraduate program at one of the state universities and graduated cum laude with only one grade below an A – reflecting some foul-up in which she was deprived of the higher grade due to some arbitrary act by an unreasonable prof.  She then signed up, at another state university, in a psychology doctoral program.  She couldn’t finish that program. 
During that time, we talked and what I could figure out was that in all of her preparation for this last schooling challenge, she had not been taught how to think; most of her experience consisted of seeing knowledge as something you memorize, and now she was being asked to construct knowledge.  Unfortunately, in terms of getting through the doctoral program – which entailed a hefty investment in funds, by the way – she was simply not prepared and had to eventually drop out. 
She is presently doing fine, has a good job in the financial world and lives in the D.C. area.  I guess her experiences, as opposed to her formal education, taught her how to reflect and appropriately engage System 2 thinking in order to do her job and to do it well.




[1] Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, p. 117.

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