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.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

MECHANICAL OR ORGANIC; WHO CARES?


[Note:  If the reader has taken up reading this blog with this posting, he/she is helped by knowing that this posting is the next one in a series of postings.  The series begins with the posting, “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-natural-rights-view-of-morality.html).  Overall, the series addresses how the study of political science has affected the civics curriculum of the nation’s secondary schools.]

This posting continues this series’ account on the effects the natural rights view has had on civics education.  Prominently, among those effects civics has portrayed a more objectified view of government and politics.  Previous postings reveal that political science, under the influence of the political systems construct, imposes a mechanical or an organic view on how the political system is described and explained in the nation’s classrooms. 
Has the way political science, the discipline, defined or observed its subject matter affected how civics education treats its subject matter?  After all, political science is the main source of information for that secondary subject.  As it turns out, political science has experienced meaningful changes since 1950.
The practitioners of that discipline, in effect, shifted from one image of politics to another; the first reflects the behavioral revolt and the second, the post-behavioral revolt (both reviewed in previous postings). That discipline went through more than one basic shift during the twentieth century and one those shifts, the second, had to do with this concern of how one could analogize governance and politics.
As for calls emanating from the post-behavioral shift, to update the way one views political systems – not as machines but as organisms – one can observe that the treatment most teachers use is machines.  They do not consciously do this but in effect that is the way they tend to view their subject matter.  But for the sake of discussion, one can concede that the better way of perceiving this subject is to look at a political system as an organism. 
If teachers were to take this organic view seriously, what does that mean in their attempts to teach students about the realities of governance?  David Easton's political systems model does address such organic elements as community, regime, and authority as integral parts of the political system.  But these elements are presented in a typical civics classroom by way of explaining how a system provides expected services. 
The political system makes authoritative allocation decisions about sought-after benefits.  The context in which these allocations take place are within the social makeup of particular groups, e.g., laws concerning gun control, or of the society as a whole, e.g., national defense policies.  Those collective settings, when viewed more organically, encourage a study or merely an observation toward a more humane perspective than what one can garner from a mechanical view. 
But within this organic view, a sense emerges; that is, that the “organism” is mostly governed by external forces which are bombarding the system with a plethora of inputs.  Therefore, this “organic” view does not alter the operative assumption that, to a meaningful degree, the system has a passive character – one of agency.  As such, the system is incapable or highly limited in its ability to voluntarily initiate action.  
To be a bit more concrete:  Imagine a single cell organism floating in a fluid.  It is attracted to positive sustenance and avoids discomforting elements.  That is how the political system is viewed “organically.”  It is not viewed as having even self-motivating capabilities of a flea or an ant.  One can observe, such a view does provide one an explanation for the apparent hypocrisy of which too many politicians can be accused. 
They simply seem to seek the immediate reward or avoid the immediate punishment.  After all, politics is defined by some as the “art of the possible.”  And the possible is determined by what the accumulated political forces in the environment contain at a given time.  As Easton indicates, as one might be drawn to behaviorism in psychology, one would perceive government as issuing chosen outputs with the expectation of being rewarded by those who operate within the system and have the requisite levels of power.[1] 
This leans toward a highly deterministic view of politics in which the political system, like the organism just described, is merely responding to stimuli in its environment.  While political behaviorists were not so crude as to be purely deterministic, the influence of such views are more than just inconsequential.  They have lent themselves toward encouraging the presentation of political and governmental realities in detached and almost inhuman fashion. 
It also presents a system incapable of truly leading the populace.  It merely responds to political pressure.  At a minimum, this approach can not be judged (at least by this writer) as one that encourages a populous to seek to establish and/or maintain a federated relationship among its members – its partners – and with the government.
Secondary textbooks, assuming one buys into this organic image, capture an essential aspect of this view.  In their pages, a vision of government emerges as something out there and while it responds to the electorate, it is not part of the electorate, much as pointed out in a previous posting, a department store and its customers are two separate elements. 
For example, in terms of feedback, as those in authority hear and see how people are reacting to past policies and actions, those in government can adjust or correct perceived “mistakes.”  Does one want an example?  Consider how the various state governments are currentlyreacting to the covid 19 crisis. 
Not only does the image presented in textbooks relate to a system devoid of any leadership potential by those in government, but the picture it presents is also misleading.  They do not sufficiently take into account the factor of power among the populous.  Not all stimuli have the same effect.  That is, as described earlier in this blog, not all participants in the system are equally capable of exerting influence, i.e., not all of them have the same power.
Government is thereby a service-rendering entity for some more than others, not an extension of the people as a whole.  This is not portrayed as a reality, but the lack of equality is not alluded to as an ideal.  Textbooks present an image where all seem to be equal in this process.  This blog in short order will provide the evidence to back up that claim. 
Let this writer remind the reader that the role of textbooks cannot be overstated.  Again, most teachers depend on textbooks to basically make their curricular choices.[2] This following quote captures the effects that textbooks and other supportive materials have on what is taught not only in civics, but across the whole curriculum:
Instructional materials represent the resources that teachers use to develop student understanding of subject-specific concepts and skills in the enactment of the curriculum.  Such materials include textbooks, workbooks, laboratory manuals, manipulatives such as three-dimensional solids, laboratory supplies and equipment, videos, laser discs, CDs, software, and websites.  Developed by many different entities, instructional materials often become critical, defining components of instructional programs … In particular, commercial publishing firms with K-12 divisions dedicated to producing and selling school textbooks are central players in shaping what most teachers teach … Educational material production is “big business” … Thus, although publishers can and do produce materials in response to particular educational changes, decisions to invest in such developments are always tempered by estimates of the potential demand for materials supporting those changes.  Accordingly, curricular content specified as important by textbook adoption policies in large states has great influence on the content of commercially available texts.[3]
Research into this concern has been consistent.
While this quote mentions other sources than the textbooks, one should remember supplemental materials are part of the textbook product.  That is, the textbook companies provide to schools these supportive materials of what their textbooks describe and explain.
          To point out the obvious, these “big businesses” have an interest in assuring that the content of their books, especially those that relate to civics do not pose challenging messaging to the system in which they operate.  The natural rights view is well ensconced in how the system operates at the school site.



[1] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.

[2] Stephen J. Thornton, “Teacher as Curricular-Instructional Gatekeeper in Social Studies, in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, edited by James P. Shaver (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 237-248.  While this citation is dated, there is no reason to believe the point made is not as true today as it was in 1991.

[3] “Chapter 4, Curriculum As a Channel of Influence:  What Shapes What Is Taught to Whom,” in Investigating the Influence of Standards:  A Framework for Research in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education, edited by Iris R. Weiss, Michael S. Knapp, Karen S. Hollweg, and Gail Burrill (Washington, DC:  National Academy Press, 2002), emphasis added.  This report is a product of the National Research Council’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.

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