WHAT CAN BE DONE

 

[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.]

 

Anyone who has taught in a common secondary classroom knows that there are meaningful limitations on how much attention he/she can give an individual student.  One can observe that there is room for some of that and meaningful relationships might emerge as a teacher addresses a particular student’s needs.  Their interaction can even lead to lifelong friendships; this writer can attest to that eventuality.  But this is the exception, not the rule.

          And beyond that, as the last posting points out, that teacher’s expertise might not even approach the needs of some students; they are of such a nature that those students need professional, psychological help.  In addition, given the number of students assigned to a teacher and the arrangement in which the teacher faces twenty to thirty students at a time (sometimes even more), that teacher cannot provide the resources – in terms of time or skills – many students need.

          But that is not to say teachers are of no consequence.  And a teacher has some tools at his/her disposal.  These tools relate to various occasions.  There are the one-on-one conversations, but there are also what a teacher decides to present in his/her lessons.  This includes the subjects he/she presents and the questions he/she asks the students to consider.

          And in this, civics lessons, and beyond them, social studies lessons, offer many suitable topics.  Therefore, there are many opportunities to bring up cases of how people dealing with maturing issues handle various situations and challenges.  They might be situations people face in either contemporary times or from historical situations.  Those situations can stretch from tort cases in courtrooms to presidential decision-making in the White House – yes, even presidents need to deal with maturation issues concerning themselves and those with whom they deal.

          The resulting lessons can be geared to address what students are facing.  This tension that characterizes what young people face – their demand for more freedom and the expectations of the social arrangements in which they find themselves – is usually at the heart of many social conflicts.  And of course, social conflicts serve to be the “meat and potatoes” of a civics curriculum.  After all, civics looks at politics and politics is about who gets what, when, and how.  Those decisions are the product of contentious competitions in the political arena.

          A teacher so disposed to offer such lessons should keep in mind that the object of such effort is to engage the students’ reasoning and reflection.  This is probably the most important component of such lessons.  The main obstacle to students being able to maturate is their reluctance to reflect and to avoid using their reason to any depth.  That, according to Jonathan Haidt,[1] proves to be an initial stumbling block with most people at times when issues arise.  The easiest reaction is to merely respond to obvious elements of the situation in question and allow their feelings to hold sway.  That is to be reflexive, not reflective.

          And all of this has to do with the consciousness of those who are affecting or are being affected by the challenge in question.  Those consciousnesses tend to blanket the situation instead of being targeted at the factors relating to the case put before them.  Such thinking goes to either/or options and misses the nuances reality hold. 

Part of the challenge a teacher faces is to make those situations relevant to the student.  Beginning with issues that affect the student or people he/she knows, they help teachers make his/her lesson relatable to the student’s feelings.  It’s not that lessons should avoid student emotions – they motivate a person to take note – but to avoid those emotions from taking over and preventing the student from giving the situation sufficient thought.

          This last suggestion might be a challenge.  The teacher often needs to analyze what it is he/she is attempting to portray and find that aspect of it that does relate to students.  This is often an obvious choice, but sometimes a bit of research or imagination helps as the teacher finds that case study or statistic or newspaper item that has or depicts information relatable to the students.  Most important topics provide such an angle if the teacher takes the time to find it.

          While this blog supports the use of federated theory – as opposed to natural rights theory – to guide curricular choices, the natural rights view can provide opposing perspectives and arguments a teacher might employ to encourage discussion.  And those who promote the natural rights view have legitimate insights to share. 

A recurring concern natural rights advocates cite is how government policy restrict illegitimately or unreasonably individuals from doing what they want to do.  Yes, the majority, through legislative action, can at times do so.  A lot of the liberalization that emanated from the Warren Court, for example, were overdue.  What this shows is that reality and justice can be highly nuanced. 

Good civics and social studies lessons pose difficult dilemmas that one needs to think about so as to arrive at well-grounded and satisfying positions.  What is promoted here is not indoctrination, but a theory that not only identifies those dilemmas but offers a teacher suggested questions he/she can ask students.

There is the federated way of seeing things and there is the natural rights way of seeing things.  There is the communal way of approaching a problem and there is the transactional way of doing so.  An ongoing stream of questioning can be founded on an overarching question:  What is the more mature way to proceed between the options each of these views offers?  That could be the recurring, fundamental question – in various forms and over various issues – a teacher might pose to students.

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[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:  Pantheon Books, 2012).

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]

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[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 Nation.  See 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.