An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …
This posting continues this
blog’s positive review of the parochial/traditional federalist construct’s
usefulness in the development of a civics curriculum. It finishes that effort by reporting on William
Schubert’s last commonplace of curriculum, that being the milieu and its element,
“student culture.”[2]
Student Culture
America, for some time
now, has set the stage and “encouraged” (mostly unintentionally) a youth
culture. Here is what this blog has
previously cited about this development,
All
in all, the strategy [to institute a values education component] did not meet
with much success, and it has generally, through the years, been abandoned.
What remained was an almost total abandonment of handling value
issues in the classroom, at least in a thought-out fashion. This left a vacuum that was filled by two
sources. One has been the all-pervasive
media and its implied values.[3] The other has been the young people
themselves. This latter source was often
played out in the context of a youth culture becoming ever more pervasive,
especially in large urban comprehensive high schools. The result:
a highly narcissistic and self-absorbed youth population.[4]
This sort of observation has been around for many years. Back in 1993, Christopher Hurn identified
several changes that have affected the milieu of American schools.[5] Starting in the 1950s, large migration
patterns began in this nation. This
included large numbers of black and Latino/a populations moving into northern
and midwestern schools.
The effects of this
movement included changes to ethnic integration, or at least desegregation, in
many schools. Also, the small community
school began to be a thing of the past or, at least, very rare as large
comprehensive schools became common.
Socially, schools became less homogeneous settings characterized by
familiar and uniform cultural symbols and artifacts. By the 1970s, the common school population
was a mix of races, classes, ethnicity.
All of this, by today’s eyes, are just the way things are and should not
be innately considered a negative situation.
But has the society found
effective ways to meet these newer realities – surely enough time has
transpired for appropriate accommodation to these changes? One way to judge whether schools have met the
implied challenges would be to take a measure of how young people are doing. The Pew Research Center took on this question
and reported on it in 2019.
Summarily, Pew reports, “American teens have a
lot on their minds. Substantial shares [of
American teens’ mental states] point to anxiety and depression, bullying, and
drug and alcohol use (and abuse) as major problems among their age, according
to … survey [results] of youth ages 13 to 17.”[6] This study goes on to describe how seven-in-ten
youths state that levels of anxiety and depression are characterizing their
peers.
And this overall concern is backed by what
mental health researchers and clinicians are reporting. To put some numbers to this concern, the Pew
report cites that between 2004 and 2016, the percent of students reporting “major
depression episodes” rose from 9 to 12.8, and “major depression episodes with
severe impairment” increased from 5.5% to 9%.
That’s nearly one of every ten teenagers in 2016.
In addition, in terms of bullying, “About a
fifth of high school students … reported being bullied on school property in
the past 12 months; 14.9% said they’d experienced cyberbullying (via texts,
social media or other digital means) in the previous year.”[7] The report goes on to share information on
gangs, poverty, and teen pregnancy, all proving to be areas of concern.
The takeaway is that in many ways, today’s youths
in the US live a life apart from the general population and that that world in
many ways places significant obstacles to a smooth and productive transition to
adulthood. However, all of this is not
new but a continuance of what was probably first noticed in the 1950s. With the advent of universal schooling, what
became obvious was that the main effect was not necessarily the spread of
knowledge – useful for employment and developing self-fulfilling social lives –
but the rise of a social and cultural transformation.
The late sociologist James Coleman warned in
the 1950s,
The
child of high-school age is “cut off” from the rest of society, forced inward
toward his own age group, made to carry out his whole social life with others
his own age. With his fellows, he comes
to constitute a small society, one that has most of its important interactions
within itself, and maintains only a few threads of connection with the outside
adult society.[8]
And why did this shifting to a more “hands-off” approach to schooling
come about?
Here one has a double
whammy: one was the diversification of
school populations (as mentioned above) and the general, growing natural rights
perspective to social and governmental policies and behaviors. The expectation by society, at large, was
that schools, in order to meet the times, should become less authoritative,
more tolerant, less unequal, and more democratic (in a natural rights sort of
way).
In short, student culture
was allowed to develop at school with less adult supervision since there was no
consensus as to the cultural standards that would set parameters on this new
level of toleration. “… [I]t is
understandable that many teachers and school officials became confused and
uncertain about their mission …”[9]
This blogger’s personal
experience – both as a student and a teacher – can attest that without a solid
sense of mission or direction, too many students lost respect for their schools
as these sites seemed to be devoid of moral authority. Students, in ever larger degree, lost the
sense that schools were worthwhile.
The next posting will
continue this rundown about how the post-World War II social landscape has
affected American youths and their evolving youth culture. With that completed, this blog will revert to
what this blogger has to say, i.e., his critique of the parochial/traditional
federalist construct before he presents the advocacy for the natural rights
construct.
[Reminder: The reader is reminded that he/she can have
access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas: The Blog Book, Volume I. To gain access, he/she can click the
following URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit
click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then looking up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]
[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11,
2022). The reader is reminded that the
claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge
of this blogger. Instead, the posting is
a representation of what an advocate of parochial federalism might
present. This is done to present a
dialectic position of that construct.
[2]
William H. Schubert, Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility
(New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing
Company, 1986).
[3] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
[4] Jean M. Twenge and W. K. Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New
York, NY: Free Press, 2009).
[5]
Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and
Possibilities of Schooling: An
Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1993).
[6] Drew DeSilver, “The Concerns and Challenges of Being
a U.S. Teen: What the Data Show,” Pew
Research Center (February 26, 2019), accessed June 29, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/26/the-concerns-and-challenges-of-being-a-u-s-teen-what-the-data-show/ .
[7] Ibid.
[8] As quoted in Paul Howe, “We’re All Teenagers Now,” Aeon
(n.d.), accessed June 29, 2022, https://aeon.co/essays/how-us-high-school-culture-brought-teen-values-to-the-world ;
[9]
Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of
Schooling, 284.
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