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, October 20, 2020

NOT PSYCHOLOGISTS, BUT …

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 

To carry on with a look at Hegel’s views on people maturing described in the last posting, that philosopher is known more for his historical-dialectic model (and noted for its effect on Karl Marx).  His maturing model, like his historical one, emphasizes contradictions and conflicts and warns that there is no smooth road to adulthood.

          And such tensions naturally have their problematic consequences on the social arrangements within which they occur.  If one keeps in mind how social arrangements of just about any sort depend on people actually getting along and behaving in ways that bolster cooperation and collaboration, one can readily see that maturing issues can be important.  They are of such importance that one can easily find cultural expressions that look at situations in which these tensions become intense – see movies like West Side Story[1]or Rebel Without a Cause.[2]

          In addition, these tensions feed and are fed by dysfunctional political movements.  Currently, that would be the level of tribalism in which issues are defined – not necessarily openly – by “identity” perceptions which, in turn, cater to the natural “Us vs. Them” biases people are apt to express.  And what this points out is that professional educators, to address this shortcoming as it affects good citizenship, need a well-founded understanding of what is happening with these young people. 

No, they don’t need to be psychologists, but to be effective they do have to have a good sense of what these tensions are and how they work themselves into how young people see reality and strive to satisfy what they perceive they want. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to indicate – given the general levels of narcissism – that they are not doing a very good job of addressing this challenge.[3]  Leading fellow educators toward better results could naturally be civics educators and beyond them, social studies educators in general.

Those educators could start by reviewing those concepts and values that highly relate to the underlying issues involved, and no issues are more involved than those relating to freedom.  And here, a distinction is helpful although in the public media one never hears that this distinction even exists.  That would be about how people define freedom. 

As the previous posting pointed out, the young person coming to terms with how they seek their freedom from authority figures (parents, school personnel, and other authorities), are heavily influenced by prevailing views of freedom or liberty.  And as this blog has pointed out numerous times, that would be the natural rights view and its promotion of natural liberty.[4] 

But in the history of humankind, there have been various views of freedom and that can be said for the US.  And in the US, the main division relates to the distinction between what prevails today, natural liberty, and what prevailed in the years before World War II, federal liberty.  The former bolsters the general sense of doing one’s own thing and the latter incorporates a sense of doing what one should do without legal or other constraints. 

And this other view introduces, beyond market values, the values of some moral construct, namely a federated morality.[5]  That morality highlights as a requisite the responsibilities of being cooperative, collaborative, and communal.  It encourages one to develop a respect for equality, not just in relation to the law, but in the conditions under which people live.  Further, those conditions should meet some reasonable levels.  And, in line with these concerns, one should respect people being able to act from their own volition to do what is right.

Hegelian notions lead to a two-pronged approach by those who want to affect this maturing process.  On one plane, they need to deal with the reality of what exists, the conditions they observe.  On a second plane, they are taking into account the historical context in which they live – and today, what prevails is the current global economic world that, despite possible policies to the contrary, exists.  And this affects their consciousness which, in turn, relies on mental visions or biases such as advanced organizers in people’s cognitive makeups. 

All of this is not at the conscious level, there are also subconscious forces at work.  That’s right; it’s a bit complicated indeed.  And it’s hard for a given person to become a responsible citizen.  The easier path is just to react to events.  Yet the responsible path, the one that bolsters the probabilities to a more productive, happier future, is to reflect on what is at stake with a given challenge, what is a moral reaction, and what leads to a better result for all involved. 

Why?  Because beyond being moral, it leads to positive reciprocal interactions, positive sentiments towards others, positive access to the communal assets and good wishes, and to positive self-fulfillment of who one truly is.  And this revelation in general terms is not so complicated or mysterious.  

It turns out that adopting this view as an overall understanding and as a plan increases the chances of success in most interactions.  Upon such successes, one falls into the habit of taking into account the interests of those involved.  That is, it pays in a variety of ways for people to be more reflective instead of being merely reflexive.[6]



[1] Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (directors), West Side Story, United Artists, 1961.

[2] Nicholas Ray (director), Rebel Without a Cause, Warner Brothers, 1955.

[3] Jean M. Twenge, and W. Keith Campbell.  The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.  New York, NY: Free Press, 2009.  This writer believes that this shortcoming is more a product of systemic factors rather than professional malpractice by educators.

[4] That would be the view that everyone has the right to determine their values and goals and the right to pursue those values and goals short of interfering with others to do likewise.

[5] A review of this moral code can be found in Toward a Federated NationSee Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).

[6] One can be reflective and immoral as morality is defined in the prevailing social arrangement.  In dramatic form, as an example, one can see the behaviors of the “godfather” in the movie, The Godfather.  There, the Don, Vito Corleone, constructed his morality based on family loyalty.  Here, the tragedy lies in this character not accepting a social environment in which the level of “Us” goes beyond not only the family or the region in which he lives but incorporates a nation-state.  Surely, his was not a federal morality even within the family.  There, there was a hierarchical arrangement with the Don at the top instead of an arrangement in which its members were federated among themselves.  Within his moral purview, though, he did act in a reflected fashion.  See Francis Ford Coppola (director), The Godfather (the film), Paramount Pictures, 1972. 

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