[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.]
This writer, through a series of
postings, dated from May 15 to June 26, 2020, provides a review of how the
established national entities of civics education have viewed that subject matter. Those entities include leading textbook
publishers and the Center for Civics Education. That view(s) can be detected in the form of
standards such organizations issue and in the content one can find in the
leading textbooks adopted in the various states to be used in classroom
instruction.[1]
In general, this writer used two sets of
questions to guide his study. But before
sharing those questions, it should be stated that he was attempting to test a
hypothesis, i.e., current civics education, as practiced in American classrooms,
is guided by the natural rights view of governance and politics. And the natural rights view promotes several
qualities: scientific language and
methodology, reductionism, objectified analysis, and a general avoidance of normative
questioning and reporting.
To informally test this hypothesis, in
terms of textbooks, the following general questions were used in reviewing two popular
publications:
· Do
the books convey natural rights’ descriptions or explanations of the various
aspects of governance or politics? If
so, how?
· Do
they entice students by being relevant or entertaining in some way? If so, how?
· And
do they relate to some federalist values or concerns such as political
interactions that can be described as communal and collaborative?
This first set of questions identifies a
direction or a general realm of interest this writer wanted to pursue in
looking at the evidence he identified.
But to actually address the hypothesis, he applied the following:
· Do they, the textbooks, describe politics in an amoral
fashion?
· Do they describe citizens as consumers of public services and
ignore or avoid mentioning them as being federated to promote the common
good?
· Are political interactions basically treated in isolated fashion
in that only the immediate rewards and punishments are considered? That is, do they employ reductionist foci in
their descriptions and explanations?
· Are issues of justice or civility ignored or at best assumed to be
in place as the books review various competitive situations that politics
entails?
To do his review, he looked at two popular textbooks used at the
high school level, Magruder’s American Government[2]and Glencoe United States Government:
Democracy in Action.[3] For each he randomly selected five paragraphs
and asked the above questions to analyze the content of the books. He reported the content of those paragraphs,
their context within the books, and an evaluation of their content by informally
using the above questions.
He found the samples indicate various qualities and,
from them, derived several conclusions.
They are:
·
Both
textbooks used basically the same tone and language. That is, they employ a matter-of-fact
reporting style. Reflecting a scientific
language, it is objectified and, in the case of Glencoe, supply a good
deal of statistics to convey derived conclusions that the book is making (Magruder
does not provide such quantified information to any meaningful degree).
·
They both
avoid any call for students to become active or involved with the various issues
identified and described in their accounts.
Instead, the focus is on the structural elements of either the national
government (little attention is given to state and local government) or on
certain elements in the political system that exist outside of the government
(such as in political parties).
· Without using the term, citizens are portrayed as
consumers of governmental services. As
such, they ignore the “of” and “by” roles Lincoln bestows on American citizens, essential roles in a republic. That is, they do not encourage or explain how
Americans can fulfill these other partnering roles that the Constitution
establishes.
· What issues these books address are what the professional
literature calls “controversial” issues.
That is, they are issues that garner a good deal of current interest
among the citizenry. They are not chosen
because of some normative standard beyond their “popularity.” In other words, they are not chosen due to
some affront to any given standards of moral principles. As such, the treatment of the issues is only
concerned with justice and civility as coincidental factors, not as their justification
to be included for consideration.
· And, with the above-mentioned consumer approach, the books express
an individual perspective – how each identified person is affected – and little
concern is expressed in terms of collectives or communal interests.
Overall, the textbooks are true to a natural rights view with its bias
for science, objectivity, and utilization of a non-normative tone and language.
[1] Elsewhere, he has critiqued the civics standards
issued by the National Council for the Social Studies. See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated
Nation: Implementing National Civics
Standards (Tallahassee, FL:
Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).
[2] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s
American Government (Boston, MA: Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2019).
[3] Richard C. Remy, Glencoe United States
Government: Democracy in Action (New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010).
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