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.

Friday, October 7, 2016

BOOM

How does an institution such as education that is conservative by nature survive, much less thrive, in a social reality noted for enormous change?  There is little evidence of it thriving today.  There are pockets of dynamic and interesting developments and innovations but, by all accounts, this common enough institution is suffering from a general lack of successes.
We all generally feel we know this place called school; it’s an institution we deal with for a number of years during our lives – as students and parents of students.  But how well do we know these places?    If you ask the typical person why we have schools, he/she would probably respond that schools are the places we learn things, where we acquire knowledge.
  Yet knowledge is not a stagnant entity; as a matter of fact, we are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge.  There are two areas of concern where this explosion is being palpably felt:  in the fields of technology and of social relations.
          The first of these fields is readily seen.  Warren L. Ziegler makes a few observations on the pace of technological change:  the language of mathematics has added more developments to its arsenal of expressions in the last hundred years than were developed in all of history before 1900; it is anticipated that about half of what we teach engineers today will be passé in ten years, and half of what we teach students today will be no longer truthful or otherwise useful by the time they are in their forties or fifties.[1]  That is a quick turn around and reflects how much new knowledge is being produced.
          Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins attribute a great deal of this explosion to something called “branching.”[2]  That is, specialties are being subdivided and creating areas of study at a greater pace, and within each subspecialty, there are very bright people advancing what is known in ever greater specificity. 
Of course, this causes certain concerns.  One, the more obvious is how do we as a society, generally, and education, more specifically, deal with this increase not only overall, but in such variety?  And two, how do we assist in informing people about developments across various fields?  How do scientists, engineers, and other experts keep up with developments in other branches, much less in other disciplines, that have bearing on their work or interests?  This is daunting in itself.
Now consider what that means to education that is charged with introducing people to those various fields.  One would think that central to such introductions is giving the neophyte a good sense in which direction a particular discipline is headed.  And yet with so much branching, is there a direction?
Curriculum workers, therefore, have the challenge to select meaningfully and viably the knowledge they will include in any given field and determine how they should organize that knowledge, both in what is new and what is not so new.  The disciplines are dynamic entities.
And yet, in the midst of all this change in the one basic “commodity” that education peddles, knowledge, how does it sustain essential areas of knowledge that education must not forget, especially public school education?  It has been argued in this blog – and it is still believed – that the primary responsibility of schools is to prepare young people to be good citizens.
Given that, how do schools maintain a focus on that charge?  Any change agent must hold on and honor that basic responsibility.  And it is in this more socially oriented realm that we are experiencing the second source of great change:  the social dimension and how schooling is expressed politically.
Schools are not the traditional comfort zones they used to be.  From dealing with diversity to the handling of “inconvenient truths” such as global warming and what we now know about race, the beginnings of life, what actually happened historically in our past, all of this is part of the “boom” in knowledge.
And this could prove to be the most challenging aspect of schools as a change target for change agents.  It is in this political environment that he/she will attempt to introduce even newer ideas, goals, functions, and processes.  And yet, given the paucity of successes alluded to above, can we afford not to attempt change?  Given the effort here, one can surmise that the answer being proposed is no.  Hopefully, the reader agrees.




[1] Warren L. Ziegler, Social and Technological Developments, rev. ed., (Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press, 1981).

[2] Allan Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins, Curriculum:  Foundations, Principles, and Issues, (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 2004).

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