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).
[4] Sarah Pope, “What Is the Influence of Peers and Youth
Culture Inside and Outside the Classroom?, LibreTexts/Social Sciences (March 5,
2021), accessed October 30, 2022, https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Education_and_Professional_Development/Foundations_of_Education_and_Instructional_Assessment_(Kidd_et_al.)/06%3A_Sociological_Influences-_Economics_and_Culture/6.06%3A_What_is_the_influence_of_peers_and_youth_culture_inside_and_outside_the_classroom.
[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).
