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, April 25, 2023

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, XII

 

[Note:  This posting is subject to further editing.]

An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation …

Of late this blog has been reviewing the elements of critical theory.  In doing so, the blog has claimed that this leftist view has posed the most prominent challenge to the natural rights construct.  Natural rights view is currently dominant and mostly guides what civics classrooms present students in way of content.[1]  The challenging view, critical theory, has been around for ninety years in various forms, and is finally having some actual influence in the US and is generating reaction from certain conservative parties – e.g., consider Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts in Florida.

          Even non-advocates of this view might consider a number of their arguments worth their consideration.  For one, many would sign up for instituting interactive instructional strategies as opposed to what one usually finds in classrooms, what critical theorists call a “banking” strategy.  In this, critical educators fall in line with progressive pedagogues who, for example, promote both open ended research and community involvement activities. 

What differentiates critical strategies from more mainstream progressive ones is that critical educators target their efforts almost exclusively to what they consider exploitive conditions.  In terms of clarifying this distinction, consider what critical educators claim their approach strives to accomplish:

         

The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own [a two-way influence]. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa [opinion] is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos [reason].

Whereas banking education[2] anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. [3]

 

To distinguish themselves, as indicated by this quote, critical pedagogues claim they engage in “problem-posing.”

And as indicated earlier in the blog, the problems posed and studied arise from the oppressive realities that confront the students.  Included in this approach is to encourage students to form a solidarity with their classmates – fellow oppressed comrades.  Being action-oriented, this approach has a dual aim:  transforming the oppressive nature of the situation and having students become fully humanized as they interact with each other and deal with their plight.

          And central, according to critical pedagogues, is discourses – the powerful dialogues in which people engage.  Transformation toward liberation relies on words that communicate what the real world is and is to function in people becoming truly human.  It surely does not rest on sentimentality or as a tool to manipulate others.  Instead, it communicates humility, not arrogance.  Among its messaging, it states a faith in humankind, not an unrealistic faith, but one that comprehends and deals with the foibles and short sightedness people tend to employ. 

As part of this mode of communicating, the discourses should promote horizontal arrangements – a real equality – instead of vertical arrangements in social as well as political relationships.  To use common parlance, the process should lead to honest partnerships where true respect for others and their views are held.

          For part of the highlighted reality is an area’s history – its background – which includes how the structural realities of an area were formed and maintained.  In the current frame, what exists is that background’s product and includes the views entertained by the oppressed and the oppressors.  So, a major aspect of the transforming process is for the current generation to decode the situations that people experience.  And the educative effort is geared to see the real nature of how and why they became and are oppressed sans the manipulative language the non-liberated oppressor employs.

Paulo Freire describes the oppressor discourses as language that utilizes oppressive generative themes.  These themes deserve a bit of explanation.  “In the process of decoding, this analysis of meaning corresponds to the stage we call the ‘description of the situation,’ and facilitates the discovery of the interaction among the parts of the disjointed whole.”[4]  The aim is to discover the dialectic forces impinging on people’s well-being – the hows and whys in which they do so.

And even if one is tempted to get boughed down on the particulars – the specific people or things in situations – the focus needs to be on the whole – the abstract composite one confronts.  That is what is known as generative themes, and if oppressive, they are oppressive generative themes.  In that mode, liberating education has students and others inquire into people’s thinking about the realities they face, and their corresponding action – their praxis.  They need to replace the oppressive generative themes with liberating ones.

The oppressed need to leave behind their self-image as objects.  In its stead, they become subjects who are drivers of what becomes real.  That is, these students are to become drivers of what is to be; they, through their study and action, discover (1) their felt needs, (2) the abstractions embedded in the codification of the language that has veiled their reality, and (3) commence to communicate the totality of that reality.

As indicated in previous postings, this process is ongoing.  Its general gist is for those involved – which might include liberated, former oppressors – to introspectively inquire as to the reasons why they have been seeing reality as they have.  If possible, this can be assisted by the services of experts from the disciplines of psychology and sociology.  With this sort of help, an interdisciplinary approach should be maintained.

          Freire, on this score, writes,

 

Once the thematic demarcation is completed, each specialist presents to the interdisciplinary team a project for the “breakdown” of his theme. In breaking down the theme, the specialist looks for the fundamental nuclei which, comprising learning units and establishing a sequence, give a general view of the theme. As each specific project is discussed, the other specialists make suggestions.[5]

 

And with that Freire discusses another element of critical pedagogy, that being interdisciplinary analysis.  The resulting studies take on a thematic form that originates from the people and are directed at them as challenges they need to resolve.  Again, as earlier in this blog it was stated, what one sees here are processes of study-praxis-study, recurring cycles.  They continue in this mode as people stake out different futures.

          To update this account, let this posting add another quote from the Freire Institute recently retrieved from the internet:

 

People can be passive recipients of knowledge — whatever the content — or they can engage in a ‘problem-posing’ approach in which they become active participants. As part of this approach, it is essential that people link knowledge to action so that they actively work to change their societies at a local level and beyond.[6]

 

And that is why this posting is entitled “Problem-Posting.”



[1] For this blogger’s more extensive argument concerning this point see Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022), available through Amazon.

[2] Banking education was explained in the previous posting. It basically refers to didactic teaching.

[3] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1999), 62, emphasis in the original.

[4] Ibid., 86.

[5] Ibid., 101.  These teams, this blogger assumes, are organized at a national level for the recurring types of problems students identify with their self-analyzing efforts in the classroom.

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