NATIONAL EFFORTS TO STEER CIVICS

[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.]

What does the natural rights’ view of governance and politics see as being the appropriate content for civics?  Included in this question is the concern over what the civic role of schools should be.  Since it is impossible to totally segregate these topics – moral outlook, perspective of politics and governance, and elements of a civics curriculum – this blog from time to time has addressed these concerns.  This posting begins addressing these curricular issues as a set of concerns even more directly.

          Most civics’ textbook writers have adopted a natural rights view.  By doing so, they have promoted either intentionally or unintentionally certain normative messages.  But to see what constitutes the content of civics, just pick up copies of the textbooks prominently used.  For a list of these books, see the posting, “A Natural Rights Curricular Direction,” April 24, 2020.

As it has been described previously, there is not much that distinguishes these textbooks. They all take a mostly structural approach to describe government.  Consequently, there is little explanation of the political aims of people or the concerns of communities that are conveyed by these classroom materials. 

As described, the systems/structural-functional approach these books use says little of the interdependence of citizens on each other.  But despite this fairly “clinical” view of government and politics, the books still convey a central moral message: that of classical liberalism or what this blog refers to as the natural rights perspective.

To be clear, the conveyance of a moral message would be the case with the adoption of any construct.  Moral implications are unavoidable.  But the ascribed liberal position is ironically to avoid values or ideological advocacy that undermine the right of individuals to determine their own value commitments – which in turn is a value position.

As this blog has pointed out before, any value position, however limited, will entail many preferences in a variety of situations and conditions.  The natural rights perspective is not immune to this general observation.  That construct has students relate to society from a very self-centered point of reference or as stated earlier in this blog, they will see civic issues from a “what's in it for me?” angle.  It’s just the natural way for them to see things. 

The only positive role that government would have under such a perspective is to provide demanded services and this perspective encourages the citizen to take on the role of a consumer.  Government, as described by the natural rights' view, is pictured as this large overarching institution that exists to render services. 

Under this view, the citizens are the consumers.  As such, the natural rights view, a view that promotes natural liberty, is in counter position to federal theory that promotes federal liberty.  The first detaches a sense of duty and obligation from liberty unless the individual chooses to attach them.  Federal liberty presupposes that duties and obligations are part and parcel of what is expected from a citizenry.

Given that this construct, the natural rights view, is the central theoretical foundation for what is taught in American civics and government classes, it has a profound impact on what young people are exposed to in terms of governmental and political content and values.  This influence is felt in a variety of ways.

Influences range from the content found in most textbooks, as just reported, to national attempts at assessing how well schools perform in this subject area.  The federal government has a hand in this latter effort.  As stated in a previous posting, it funds the Center for Civic Education and, through the Center, the Educational Testing Service.  Jointly, they produce the Nation's Report Card, which includes results emanating from testing in civics.

Testing results are not used to assess student progress, as those tests are administered to a random sample of students, but to assess how well schools in general are doing in instructing students in various subject areas.  An upcoming posting will look at this testing to see how individualistically oriented it is or how much it reflects natural rights’ thinking.

The federal effort to date, like the prominent textbooks, has shied away from explicit individualistic language.  The individualist language is derived from the fact that it avoids moral questioning or references to duties and obligations.  The writers of the test instruments, both in terms of the test items or the standards that are devised to generate the test items, stick to the structural attributes of governance and politics and avoid delving into what those elements should be.

A look at the process the Center uses to produce the test can be helpful.  To test students, the Center for Civic Education, before producing the test items, develops the standards upon which the questions are based.  This process has generated a book containing those standards.  The reader is encouraged to obtain a copy of the National Standards for Civics and Government or go online and look up the national standards; the most recent edition that a search online reveals was published in 2014.

That publication, probably more than any other, reflects the ongoing position of the US Department of Education regarding curricular content for civics.[1]  Until a few years ago, this writer had been looking at these efforts for some time.  Full disclosure, this writer served on a team charged with writing test items during the early 2000s. 

Starting with the next posting, this blog will review the content of those standards.  But before turning this blog over to that effort, one more point for this posting.  It strikes this writer that when one looks at the officialdom of social studies at the national level, one can sense that a change of direction might be in the works – hopefully, the C3 Framework (see citation #1) indicates a more normative direction.  Time will tell.

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[1] Of recent vintage, the federal government’s Department of Education efforts has included a joint project with the professional organization of social studies educators, the National Council for the Social Studies.  That project has issued a set of national standards for civics.  To see the product of that effort see National Council for the Social Studies, Preparing Students for College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) (Washington, D. C.:  NCSS, 2013), accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.socialstudies.org/c3 .  To see this writer’s critique of that effort, see Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020) particularly Chapter 1, “C3 Framework of Standards.’’

A NATURAL RIGHTS CURRICULAR DIRECTION

[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 picks right up from the last one.  That posting observed that civics education in US schools has been guided by the natural rights view of governance and politics.  In terms of values, they place in priority natural liberty[1] above all other values and that leads to many concrete consequences.  The consequences range from ignoring serious challenges to the political society of the US to resulting in an instructional approach devoid of the very humanness politics entails.

To illustrate with a simple example, a teacher who might be guided by an alternative construct, federation theory, might on the first day of classes begin by having students reflect on how the government is an extension of who they are as a people.  The discussion would be general, and the teacher might want to just get a handle on how students think and feel about government. 

A look at the first recommended activity in the Magruder book, a popular high school textbook, suggests the following:

As students get settled, ask them to answer the following question:  What have you done recently that involved government that affected you or someone you know?  (Sample responses:  rode on a public bus; obeyed street signs; attended a public school)

Then have each student describe at least four useful things government does for its citizens.  Have students share their ideas.[2]

Right off, the student is defined as a consumer of government services.  As such, that mindset encourages the view that the government is something apart from citizens, not an extension of them. 

Yes, too much can be made of this example.  This questioning that is suggested could be one in which the author of the textbook believes it is initially important to establish government’s relevancy to some practical concern – riding a public bus.  But in reviewing this and the other popular textbooks, one can analyze their content to see if this initial tone reflects what they contain – this blog will proceed to do so for the Magruder book and one other popular textbook. 

And that tone communicates that the government is merely a service dispenser – services rendered in exchange for tax dollars spent.  Or stated another way, what the Constitution establishes is a marketplace for public services not the protector of a societal partnership.

In addition, this message places the emphasis on individualism – as contained in the natural rights construct in which students are encouraged to develop their own values and goals.  Consequently, it will have students relate to society from self-centered points of references.  There is nothing inherently wrong with asking students to hold their interests as being important or of value.  But to impart those interests within a federated arrangement, the questioning needs to be contextualized in how those interests relate to justice and civility. 

Without that context, the natural tendency is for the young student to be introduced to the subject without a concern for what constitutes good citizenship.  In that void, natural tendencies take hold and those tendencies easily legitimize self-centered biases. 

This is so not because of a logical necessity for them to be so judged, but because of human nature.  An absence of any direction toward responsible civic posturing will give license to students to see social conditions as only opportunities to promote self-serving values and goals.[3]  He or she will see civic issues from a “what's in it for me?” angle.  People need to be taught a level of civic responsibility; it doesn’t come naturally.[4] 

There are many levels of intensity in which civic oriented pedagogical objectives can be sought.  But whatever level one sees as a reasonable counterweight to total self-indulgence, that level needs to be taught and encouraged in young citizens if we expect a corresponding level of civil behavior to manifest itself.

For the sake of discussion, in terms of even the staunchest believers in the natural rights construct, they still believe that citizens, no matter what their personal values are, must be responsible enough to obey the laws.  If limited to a concern over law abiding behavior, then what is the purpose of government? 

The only positive role that government would have is to provide sought after services and if this perspective prevails, it encourages the citizen to take on the role of a consumer.  Government, as has been pointed out in describing the natural rights' view, is pictured as this large overarching institution that exists to render services.  Under this view the citizens are the consumers.  By paying their taxes, they are portrayed as entitled to those services in much the same way as shoppers are entitled to the services of a private vendor. 

Under this approach, government loses a lot of its “of the people” and “by the people” qualities and maintains only its “for the people” reason for existence.  This message, while not explicitly expressed in civics instruction, is assumed in the presentation that textbooks provide. 

Since the overwhelming number of teachers relies on the given textbook to define what the content of their instruction is, then how a textbook approaches a subject is central to what is taught.  The entailed strategy, therefore, tends to ignore communal concerns and the promotion of a citizenry aligned to mutual responsibilities and obligations.

There is also evidence that in addition to textbook writers, the federal Department of Education has favored, through its funding practices, this bias.  It funds organizations in the field that, more or less, utilize this natural rights construct as their theoretical base.  This has been the expressed preference of the federal government until an apparent shift of late.  This shift will be described shortly in this blog.

But until that recent effort, the federal government, in the language it uses to describe grant related funding (either in its directives or in the products those grants have produced) assuages the more virulent individualistic forms of the construct.  But, even in its apparent shift, it has not promoted another organizing ideal or concept to challenge or replace this prevalent perspective.[5]  

For example, significant federal funding has gone to the Center for Civic Education and to the Educational Testing Service to produce the National Assessment Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program known as the Nation's Report Card.  As part of its testing, NAEP includes civics.  That testing in large measure is based on standards developed by the Center for Civic Education. 

The language of that organization has adopted more concern for civic engagement and related duties.  But success is still based on the ability to do well on tests that in turn rely on information contained in utilized textbooks.  That testing reflects the point being made here and will be reviewed in this blog in an upcoming posting.

This posting will stop here in its lead up to analyzing two of the earlier cited textbooks.  This blog will review the content of the above cited textbook, the Magruder book,[6] and also the Clencoe book.[7]  Between them, they account for most of the reading material distributed to high school students for the course, American government.  By doing so, that will basically define the civics curriculum that American school districts implement.

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[1] Natural liberty is was captured by the following citation:  “[John] Winthrop identifies ‘natural liberty’ as the liberty ‘common to man with beasts and other creatures.” It is, in other words, the “liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good.’ Importantly, this type of liberty resists all authority and ultimately, is the source of moral evil.”  See “The First ‘On Liberty,’” Intercollegiate Studies Institute:  Educating for Liberty, October 28, 2011, accessed on July 1, 2018, https://faculty.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/686/.  Emphasis added.  A more common account of this concept is a liberty in which everyone has the right to decide his/her values and the rights to live accordingly as long as he/she does not prohibit others of the same options.

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[2] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s American Government – Teacher’s Edition, 4.

[3] A whole rationale for capitalism centers on this notion.  Capitalism works because it in effect targets and gives incentives for people, within certain parameters to seek their self-interests.  Jonah Goldberg calls the success of market economies to harness individual self-interest as “The Miracle.”  See Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

[4] Natural tendencies do encourage social ties especially with those seen as members of one’s group.  A person naturally wants approval by those deemed important, but that sense of linkage does not override tendencies to manipulate situations to garner sought after desires.  This is especially true for most young people during adolescence.  Therefore, such “attachment” drives do not inhibit opportunistic behaviors that tread on other’s interests or rights.  This blog has addressed the challenges of adolescence (see “Stages in Hegel’s Maturing Process,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, November 16, 2018, accessed April 28, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2018/11/stages-in-hegels-maturing-process.html.)  Also see Philip Selznick’s reporting of Hegel’s maturation model in Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth:  Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1992).

[5] See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  Of particular interest see Chapter 1, “C3 Framework of Standards.’’

[6] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s American Government (Boston, MA:  Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2019).

[7] Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action (New York, NY:  McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010).