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.

Friday, October 7, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XX

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

Moving on with the commonplace of curriculum development – the learner – the next concern of this blog is pedagogic student interests.[2]  Gerald Gutek[3] puts forward the argument of essentialists, i.e., that the pedagogic interests of students are served if they are mastering the basic skills and acquiring basic subject matter content.  E. D. Hirsch writes how skills and content are related.

 

All cognitive skills depend on procedural and substantive schemata that are highly specific to the task at hand.

          Once the relevant knowledge has been acquired, the skill follows.  General programs contrived to teach general skills are ineffective.  [Artificial intelligence] research shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and quickly available information.  What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse, task-specific information.[4]

 

Or more directly,

 

Teacher-centered philosophies [such as essentialism] are those that transfer knowledge from one generation of teachers to the next. In teacher-centered philosophies, the teacher’s role is to impart a respect for authority, determination, a strong work ethic, compassion for others, and sensibility. Teachers and schools succeed when students prove, typically through taking tests, that they have mastered the objectives they learned.[5]

 

          Hirsch continues in this vein by further pointing out that his cited research has found that such skills as critical thinking or inquiry skills are only taught successfully for specific tasks and content and are not transferable as is claimed by the Rousseau-Dewey tradition.[6]  Even among researchers who generally support inquiry, a level of concern can be detected.

          For example, and looking at this instructional approach from a more global perspective, the following can be found:

 

It should be cautioned that inquiry-based learning takes a lot of planning before implementation. It is not something that can be put into place in the classroom quickly. Measurements must be put in place for how students [sic] knowledge and performance will be measured and how standards will be incorporated. The teacher’s responsibility during inquiry exercises is to support and facilitate student learning … A common mistake teachers make is lacking the vision to see where students’ weaknesses lie. According to Bain, teachers cannot assume that students will hold the same assumptions and thinking processes as a professional within that discipline …

While some see inquiry-based teaching as increasingly mainstream, it can be perceived as in conflict with standardized testing common in standards-based assessment systems which emphasise the measurement of student knowledge, and meeting of pre-defined criteria, for example the shift towards “fact” in changes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a result of the American No Child Left Behind program.

Programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Program can be criticized for their claims to be an inquiry based learning program … While there are different types of inquiry … the rigid structure of this style of inquiry based learning program almost completely rules out any real inquiry based learning in the lower grades. Each “unit of inquiry” is given to the students, structured to guide them and does not allow students to choose the path or topic of their inquiry. Each unit is carefully planned to connect to the topics the students are required to be learning in school and does not leave room for open inquiry in topics that the students pick. Some may feel that until the inquiry learning process is open inquiry then it is not true inquiry based learning at all. Instead of opportunities to learn through open and student-led inquiry, the IB program is viewed by some to simply be an extra set of learning requirements for the students to complete.[7]

 

This extended quote is included to point out that even in an inquiry-based approach, educators need to give essentialist ideas and ideals due respect – again, students need information before they can go off and inquire or do whatever else education calls on them to do.

          That tradition – the Rousseau-Dewey tradition – emphasizes intensive study by classroom students in which critical thinking skills, inquiry skills, or discovery skills (terms that are often used interchangeably) are practiced and “taught” over limited material (teaching in depth, not breadth).  This antithesis argument claims that students need many referents in order to make sense of the realities of the world.

          Expert thinking, as studied by current cognitive psychologists, is evidenced by being able to recall many facts which are contained within the contexts of schemata.[8]  Schemata mentally arrange facts in meaningful groupings or chunks of information.  “As we have seen, the most effective system of the mind, whether in chess or in reading, is to keep most of its indexed schemata at a medium level of generality.” [9]

          What works in reading and chess works for governmental studies.  The political systems approach, under the construct of the natural rights perspective, provides such a medium level of generality.  It is a viable vehicle by which to arrange meaningful and relevant political facts.  Relevancy is determined by the goals of the natural rights perspective to prepare students to be viable citizens in the competitive realities of the American political system.

          The next posting will pick up on this theme as it continues this review of pedagogic student interests.

[Reminder:  Readers are reminded that they can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, they can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit 

OR

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 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.  [Note:  This blog, in the postings entitled “Judging the Natural Rights View, I-XVI, started with “An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation …”  It should have read “An advocate of natural rights …”  Please excuse the mistake.  The archived record has been corrected.]

[2] The learner or student is one of Joseph Schwab’s commonplaces.  See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] Gerald L. Gutek, Basic Education:  A Historical Perspective (Bloomington, IN:  Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1981).

[4] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know (New York, NY:  Vintage, 1987), 61.

[5] Matthew Lynch, “Philosophies of Education:  2 Types of Teacher-Centered Philosophies,” The Edvocate/Entelechy, August 5, 2016, accessed October 5, 2022, https://www.theedadvocate.org/philosophies-education-2-types-teacher-centered-philosophies/.

[6] Hirsch, Cultural Literacy.

[7] “Inquiry-based Learning,” Lumen/Foundation of Education (n.d.), accessed October 5, 2022, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-education/chapter/inquiry-based-learning/.  British spelling.

[8] Schemata, plural form of schema, are representations of developed plans, theories, or models presented in the form of graphic models, other graphic presentations, or outlines.

[9] Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, 64. 

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XIX

 

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

In line with this positive presentation of the natural rights view, this posting looks at the political interests of students.  That is in line with this blog’s review of the commonplace of curriculum development (a la Joseph Schwab’s thinking[2]) of the learner and how it fits the aims of civics education.  Again, the learner is but one of the commonplaces; the others are the subject matter, teachers, and milieu.

Political Student Interests

Naturally, what this blog has presented under the commonplace, the student, in previous postings alludes to the political interests of students.  Three areas of interest that relate to instruction and would be of particular benefit to students’ political interests are: 

 

1.    instruction that highlights the political systems model’s value of liberty as expressed by the recognized rights accorded – or belonging to – Americans,

2.    instruction describing and explaining the processes of the nation’s political system, and

3.    instruction reviewing the structural elements of that system.

 

After readers consider these three aims, they might be tempted to also consider the resulting course of study in American government or civics as being similar to a user’s manual.  Why?  Because such aims are directed at dispensing the practical information of governmental institutions from which students can derive useful descriptions and explanations.  Such a course will empower young students with a clear understanding of the rights they and other participating citizens have in working the system.

     Along with these elements, students also deserve further realistic descriptions and explanations about how competitive the system is.  In that line of thinking, readers might ask:  how do these elements fit the essentialist demands for education?  To answer that question, readers are helped by considering a historical character.  That would be Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear naval submarine, who was an outspoken promotor of essentialist thinking. 

He also became involved in and was an influential contributor to American educational policy.  Gerald Gutek,[3] toward the last years of Rickover’s life, provided a historical account of the admiral’s contribution.  That account summarizes Rickover’s recommendations for schools as they carry out their important mandates.  These recommendations are:

 

·      Commitment to a liberal education, emphasizing a knowledge base which would be employed to train young people to think and solve problems

·      Multiple tracks so that students can be placed in classroom settings suitable to their academic ability

·      National standards

·      Concentration on academic education for the talented students

·      Preparation for the technological society of a modern economic nation for the average and below average students

 

These essentialist conditions would – so his view holds – lead to serious attempts to prepare young people for the realities of the American political system.

          The natural rights perspective, as defined earlier in this blog (especially when it reviewed the work of Robert Gagne), provides a paradigm of curriculum that is flexible for different levels of sophistication.  But Rickover goes a bit further in that he supports tracking, and a highly (what essentialists are apt to believe) realistic view of political life in American society.  The result is to limit the opportunities of the youngsters in their preparation that would allow them to maximize the political opportunities that exist and, therefore, the main essentialist thought today sides with Gagne.

          But overall, essentialists argue that without this sort of approach or concern, they decry that such indifference to student abilities has led to school conditions characterized by a decline in academic standards, a decline in respect for authority, particularly of teachers, immoral behavior and ethics with a corresponding increase in violence, delinquency, and deterioration of civic values.[4]

          To state the obvious, these are not appropriate conditions for preparing young people to be successful in the competitive world they currently face or will face as adults.  As such, a less than meaningful implementation of the prescribed approach is leading to the incivility and insufficient levels of social capital Robert Putman laments.[5]  And that leads to the next posting which focuses on students’ pedagogic interests.



[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.  [Note:  This blog, in the postings entitled “Judging the Natural Rights View, I-XVI, started with “An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation …”  It should have read “An advocate of natural rights …”  Please excuse the mistake.  The archived record has been corrected.]

[2] See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] Gerald L. Gutek, Basic Education:  A Historical Perspective (Bloomington, IN:  Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1981).

[4] Ibid.  This blog has provided a good deal of cited sources that support these unfortunate conditions.

[5] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).  Social capital is defined as a societal environment as having active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.