A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XXVII

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting is the last one of these “judgements” about the natural rights view.  When this blogger, after his upcoming break, picks up with this account again, it will be to start a critique of that view.  To remind readers, these “judgement” postings are part of a dialectic argument that promotes the incorporation of the natural rights view as the main construct guiding how people should see governance and politics and, beyond that, civics education. 

Presently, this offering rounds out this blog’s review of the commonplace of curricular development, the school site milieu, by addressing youth culture.  And on that front, the implementation of any curricular proposal would be highly challenged by the prevailing youth culture of today.  One can get a sense of the effect that cultural influences have on young people and how they perform in schools by comparing the youth of America and those of other countries – for example, Asian youths. 

Reporting on the research of Richard Nisbett, Matthew Lynch writes,

… the Asian children see the world in terms of the relationship between things, whereas the American children see the world in terms of the objects as distinct entities. This information is helpful when we consider how cultural background might influence [an] approach to both learning and school performance. There are a number of theories that seek to explain differences in school performance among different racial and ethnic groups.[2]

 

This cited article goes on to describe and explain three “theories” of cultural effects:  the cultural deficit theory, the expectation theory, and the cultural difference theory.   In 1993, Christopher J. Hurn wrote of these influences.[3]  He pointed out that America’s youth have become antagonistic or indifferent to many of the values and beliefs of the dominant adult population.

          That is, parental authority had become harder to assert in the two previous decades.  More recent accounts have not noted any change in that state of affairs.  Sarah Pope provides an extensive list of the social forces and their effects on American secondary school students.[4]  To pick up on Hurn’s concerns, schools have found it more difficult to encourage their students to exert their best efforts in school.  Coercive measures issued by schools have not been seen as intimidating by the current generation (and the one that has followed).  “Increasingly schools became simply places to which one went, more or less willingly, to work …”[5]

          In addition to this general lack of optimal conditions among today’s students, as cited in the previous posting, there are pockets of disadvantaged schools because they are in lower income areas.

 

For Americans who are trapped by poverty and must attend America’s worst schools:  few opportunities, a sense of being trapped, degradation, self-blame, resentment, and lives that are likely to involve crime and violence … America pays a terrible price in correctable disadvantage for perhaps a quarter of its citizens.  And we all suffer the consequences of this disadvantage in massive rates of murder, pillage, drug addiction, and imprisonment in our nation. [6]

 

So reported David Berliner and Bruce Biddle in 1995 and little has changed in the ensuing years.  Most of the current literature is about how a lack of education affects crime rates, but there seems to be a relationship the other way around:  that is, the effect of crime on education.  Clearly, a lack of education increases chances for crime and for parents and teenagers who engage in crime, when incarcerated, stand to significantly face fewer chances of being sufficiently educated.

 

·       Unlike the general public, people who have been to prison are more likely to have GEDs than they are to have traditional high school diplomas.  And three-quarters of those GED certificates are earned in prison.

·       Formerly incarcerated people are 8 times less likely to complete college than the general public.[7]

 

These meaningful hurdles make it imperative that schooling becomes the subject of systemic analysis and reform.

          The effective school reform outlined above (in previous postings) promises a no-nonsense approach in which educators would apply behavioral principles in the classroom.  Emphasizing the dispensing of basic essential information of the political system, the essentialist approach would apply methods that have proven themselves.  These methods have been beneficial to all income groups and would objectively determine the problems that exist in a given school with a given student population.

          An instrumental model toward this end is provided by John B. Carroll[8] who considers the variables of aptitude, ability to understand instruction, perseverance, time opportunity, and quality of instruction.  Other models, in ensuing years, have been developed along these lines.[9]  The point is that with a body of knowledge, such as political systems, a systematic analysis of the factors operating in a school, both at the psychological as well as the sociological levels, can generate appropriate responses to the challenges present at particular school sites.

          With that, this blog concludes its presentation of a rationale defending and promoting the utilization of the natural rights view to guide curricular decisions, in general, and civics education, in particular.  Again, this has been a dialectic argument, one that will be critiqued when this blog resumes.

[Note:  As regular and ongoing readers of this blog might know, this blogger takes a break every four hundred postings.  He did so after 400, 800, and now will do so after 1200 postings.  As of his counting, this posting is number 1200.  So, it’s time to take that break.  When this blog begins again, it will, as just stated, critique the natural rights view of governance and politics, especially as it influences civics education.  This blogger is looking forward to the break – which will last at least two, maybe three, months – and of returning from it to resume producing this blog’s postings.]



[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed 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 the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Matthew Lynch, “Examining the Impact of Culture on Academic Performance, The Edvocate (August 3, 2016), accessed October 30, 2022, https://www.theedadvocate.org/examining-the-impact-of-culture-on-academic-performance/.

[3] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling:  An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, 1993).

[5] Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling, 285.

[6] David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis:  Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley Company, Inc., 1995), 268-269.

[7] Lucus Couloute, “Getting Back on Course:  Educational Exclusion and Attainment among Formerly Incarcerated People,” October 2018, accessed October 30, 2022, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/education.html#:~:text=Unlike%20the%20general%20public%2C%20people,college%20than%20the%20general%20public. Emphasis in the original.  More recent emphasis has been placed on such individuals being trained in skilled trades such as plumbing or carpentry.

[8] John B. Carroll, “A Model of School Learning,” Teacher’s College Record, 64 (1963), 723-733.

[9] For example, see Robert Slavin, Educational Psychology:  Theory and Practice, 12th Edition (London, UK:  Pearson, 2018).

No comments:

Post a Comment