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A funny thing about the relationship between civics education
and political science is that the practitioners of both fields do not give the
relationship much thought. This is
doubly true for political scientists, but at least civics teachers, to be
certified, need to earn credits in political science. But despite this apparent indifference, there
seem to be two functions that relationship serves.
They take the following form: political science provides information that
civics courses use, and civics courses prepare students to expect objectified
information when the topic is politics – an assumption contemporary political
science favors. To find evidence of how
these functions are satisfied in civics education, one can look at civics’
textbooks.
In practical terms, those textbooks
tell civics teachers what to teach and an overview of their content is very
telling as to how these reinforcing functions are performed. Generally, the effect of these books and the
related instruction are to convey to students a consumerist view of
citizenship. That is, the typical
American, as depicted in these books, is a person with a limited concern about
what governments are or what they do. Their
topics center on how the various entities within the polity compete to attain
favorable governmental services.
That is, the descriptions are akin to
describing a customer at some retail store.
This is a far cry from the image one gets from Lincoln’s refrain: “of the people, by the people, and for the
people.” It, in other words, ignores the
partnership view that the Constitution establishes. Partners do not limit their concerns to what
an enterprise can provide them on a given day.
They instead have a longer-term view,
and that view holds that the health of the enterprise is extremely important. They express this concern in their views, pronouncements,
and strategies about how they behave within the partnership. If one holds to the ideal expressed in
Lincoln’s statement, then one sees this lack of normative concern in civics
instruction as a shortcoming.
In general, civics textbooks do not, to
a meaningful degree, advance a partnership sense of citizenship. Not only do these books avoid normative
issues, but given they are based on the political systems model, they also neglect
an essential element of that model, that being the “feedback loop.” That is, these books neglect looking at how
people react to governmental policies.
To explain this element, it falls in
line with how organisms react to stimuli.
Early utilization of the political systems model received criticism because
it relied too heavily on the behavioralist notion of “reward/punishment”
determinants or as the field calls it:
“stimulus-response.” Simply
stated, it tended to see political behavior as merely a calculated process by
which a person attempts to maximize rewards and minimize punishments.
That early criticism summarily pointed
out that its approach was a mechanical view of politics. By emphasizing inputs, conversion, outputs,
the use of the model did not sufficiently provide attention to a subject’s feelings,
motivations, and the other subjective aspects of a person’s awareness and
reaction.
But,
by shifting more attention to the feedback element, and the array of emotions that a reaction
might include, that would give the model a needed organic sense or view. As a result, David Easton eventually
called for these other factors to be taken into account in political studies.[1]
But civics textbooks ignore this
feedback feature and, therefore, instead of an organic view, these books retain
the model’s initial mechanistic view – machines don’t react, they simply follow
the physical laws of nature. This in
effect renders these books as giving governance and politics a dehumanized portrayal
as they avoid subjective information and, therefore, tend not to account for the
controversies that naturally arise in everyday politics.
The view, instead, limits itself to
describing entity X seeking governmental service, Y, by performing Z
process. Missing is the more intriguing
story of how the actors, reflecting on a slew of motivations, dispense rewards
and punishments by governments and citizens (e.g., favorable policies by
government or political donations by citizens) in an ongoing process over time. As such, there is little in these books on
how the participants of the system are either motivated or dissuaded to behave
in the various options open to them.
There are various areas in which this focus on science, described
in previous postings, has meaningful effects on how civics textbooks approach
their subject matter. In relation to
this just addressed issue, how and why political actors act as they do, the first
of these areas has to do with how the very acts of politics are defined.
Starting with Harold Lasswell’s seemingly flippant definition –
politics is determining “who get what, when, how” – this definition promotes
that above mentioned consumerist character and it loses, to a meaningful degree,
the assumed overall motivation to advance the interests of the common good or
the seeking of that “perfect union.” But
it took a couple of decades, starting in the thirties, for Lasswell’s view to
take hold in the fifties.
That eventuality can be marked with the contribution of
Easton. The popularization of the
political systems model is attributed to him.
He commented extensively on the implications of this model, but at its
base what one carries away is an explicit image of a transactional system.
Actors are motivated by self-interest and mostly engage in
tit-for-tat interactions. They seek
rewards and avoid punishments. While in
actuality, this basic pattern leads to complicated consequences – e.g.,
mounting advantages by those who have inordinate levels of political assets –
the basic process is relatively easy to accept because under a natural rights
view it is easy to understand.
And as such, it becomes a convenient framework for civics
textbooks. Here, within their covers,
one finds an overall motivational view for politics, a series of descriptions
of participants in the resulting competition which characterizes politics, and descriptions
of the organizational set-ups in which those participants function.
Resulting textbooks, in summary, have a recurring format: there are the basic rules of the political
game (early chapters), the input groupings (the second set of chapters), and the
conversion structures (primarily the latter chapters). What is not included are the output/feedback
aspects, which are mostly ignored. At
best, a student so instructed turns out to be an informed observer of the
nightly news.
[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.
