WALKING A BEAT?

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

This blog has made a connection between the natural rights view and scientific research with its methodology.  It’s not that one engages in scientific research naturally.  It took humans a long time to develop science.  Humans are naturally too emotional to readily engage in objectified studies about what they find important.  Even the notion of advancing knowledge for its own sake would seem foreign to people until a few hundred years ago.  At its beginning, science even got people in trouble in that it questioned their more natural tendency to think religiously.

          Probably the most celebrated case of this latter development was the trouble that Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei had.  He actually claimed that the earth was not the center of the solar system; it, he claimed, revolves around the sun, not vice versa.  And how did he arrive at his “speculation?”  He used scientific methods including utilizing his telescope.  But that view flew in the face of religious dogma prevalent in the Western world.

Up to his time, knowledge or what was taken for knowledge, was primarily arrived at through logic (e.g., the work of Greek philosophers) or inspiration (e.g., the work of those who wrote the books of the Bible).  With the pioneers of science, observation became a third viable way.  Its advent was not met with open arms by those in power.  But because of its payoffs, science came to be seen not only as legitimate but essential.

          But can science be deficient?  A growing number of voices are beginning to question its power especially when it comes to the study of human behavior.  It seems that what is judged to be so efficient in the study of the natural world is insufficient in studying human endeavors.  Investigating many questions relating to humans in what they do and how they think and feel, science proves to be short-sighted especially when it comes to complex social arrangements. 

In political science, reductionism, narrowing a study to a limited set of factors or variables, seems to miss the richness of how and why humans behave the way they do in political and other related situations.  The shortfall occurs when those ways of thinking are applied to conditions that organizations exhibit.

          This blogger has posted online an “appendix chapter”[1] that reviews these shortcomings, but here he questions how scientific approaches affect other concerns.  That is, this problem does not only affect the advancement of political knowledge.  It also affects those professional fields that depend on political and the other social sciences as their personnel formulate policies and the implementations of those policies. 

An example of this, one that had to do with national defense, was the inability of Israeli intelligence to see the impending attacks that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Organizations tend these days to rely on scientific, objectified protocols to help them determine policy, while their environs do not lend themselves to the reductionist methods sciences employ. 

They also fund scientific research to conduct organizational studies.  This bias, when combined with other institutional practices (e.g., group thinking or rational analyses of cost/benefits), leads to the inability to recognize growing, “incubated” problems.  They exist within their organizations according to research conducted by Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki.[2]

These problems fester, grow, and eventually burst upon the scene like the attacks on Israel back in ’73.  This is not a matter of incompetent practices; those practices are responsible for organizations growing and being successful.  By so growing, these organizations become complex entities, and establish the conditions that potentially make the utilization of purely scientific research insufficient.

As this blog has indicated repeatedly, science is powerful.  Its ability to discover reality is without equal.  But in various ways it leads to false security as this Israeli example illustrates.  Through its reductionism it lacks richness.  The study of humans, especially, calls for holistic studies in which the richness of various environments or environmental elements can be considered and analyzed in their wholeness.  This often includes the emotional richness studied subjects bring to situations but cannot be reduced to measurable sets of finite variables.

This writer, from his own experience, can add another telling example.  He can remember, when he was quite young in New York City, the neighborhood policeman walking his beat.  This policeman, who was generally friendly, would capture his admiration as the man in blue who could expertly swing his baton or truncheon.  Such cops are depicted in old films, for example the film, Singin in the Rain. 

Then came the scientific-inspired systems theory to study large organizations – for example, the New York City Police Department – and that “walking” cop disappeared.  And with his disappearance, police departments, such as New York’s, lost a source of invaluable, holistic information.  This became serious in large cities.  While there is a good deal of rhetoric bemoaning this loss, especially with cases such as the incident with George Floyd, cost/benefit analyses prohibit that source's return.[3]

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[1] URL site for this appendix is https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed July 8, 2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.

[3] Apparently, cops do walk where people congregate but not in neighborhoods.  They are labor intensive and judged to being either inefficient or too costly.

FEDERATION’S REQUISITES

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

To this point, this blog has, in its account of the different obstacles facing civics teachers, described in broad strokes a number of deficient conditions.  They are the dysfunctional aspects of the nation’s political culture, the challenge of immaturity among students, and the less than optimal state of civics education.  With this posting, the blog shifts to the landscape of the political culture itself. 

Or in other words, the blog will now look at the social environmental factors that define the nation’s politics of the day.  Rightly so, the nation has cast its main attention – beyond the pandemic – on the divisive nature currently holding sway.  That divisiveness affects just about every aspect of social life – reportedly, it is even affecting family relationships – and definitely poses an obstacle to civics teachers doing their jobs. 

The aim here is to analyze this challenge and provide various insights as to its nature and suggests what teachers and other educators should do in relation to the challenge.  To be clear, what is being addressed is the polarized politics hanging over government in its attempts to issue policies.  And those affected policies seem to include just about all the possible areas in which government has a role. 

That extends to whether masks should be mandated, to what should be taught in schools, to defining who this nation’s antagonistic foes abroad are.  All of these up to the present were not controversial and summoned broad agreement across parties and other social/political divisions.

          And, as with the rest of this blog, commentary or evaluation will be offered against the stated criteria that federation theory holds, what that theory sees as beneficial, functional, and moral.  To reiterate, that would be curricular content that promotes communal, collaborative, and caring dispositions within the citizenry.  As such, the specific challenge for this review is to point out and explain how the dominance of the natural rights construct has found such aims to be misplaced and worthy of being ignored.

          And what is it about the natural rights view that makes it so problematic in terms of federal beliefs?  David Brooks, in his most recent book, provides vivid imagery of what this problematic thinking generates.  In describing the nation’s tribalism, one of the dysfunctional conditions he identifies, he writes,

Psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure.  People who are left naked [in a self-centered society] and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do.  They revert to tribe.  Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.[1]

The main point this blog has made in terms of the natural rights view is that it promotes an extreme individualism.   

For advocates of federation theory or views one can associate with it, this is not just a matter of aesthetics or taste.  The dismissal of such concerns for community, collaboration, and care for others – or a lack of it – incorrectly instructs what the US Constitution sets forth.  It, the Constitution, established a republic based on the very communal commitment toward a polity made up of voluntary partnering – through the mechanism of a sacred compact – that unified both the people of the United States and the states of the United States.

The Latin word for this sort of leaguing is foedus – the Latin word from which federalism is derived and meaning covenant (the religious version of a compact).[2]  Now, Brooks writes of this sort of leaguing as the product of a love commitment.  That can be toward another person, as in marriage, an ideal, a place, a country.  Can a nation be based on the assumption its citizens hold to such a love?  In this, this writer questions the level of emotion Brooks ascribes to such a commitment, but the point is made.  Citizenship defined by a compact-al agreement calls for a lot.

          Should such an alignment rely on people’s natural tendencies?  Unlike with natural rights, as just indicated, which does rely heavily on natural proclivities, federation theory relies on them in part, but not totally.  Yes, humans naturally want community, but are easily convinced to seek other goals and/or to define community in a highly parochial manner.[3] 

Hence, to maintain what the founding fathers established, subsequent generations have needed to proactively promote that compact of unity.  And to do so, they have needed to socialize the populous to instill those values, attitudes, beliefs, and civic modes of behavior that promote this sense of partnership – it just doesn’t happen naturally. 

And it has become somewhat obvious, that the more recent generations have not sufficiently socialized the incoming generations so that they are disposed to meet this obligation or commitment – not to the degree the Constitution proscribes.  Instead, by adopting the natural rights view, they find policies aimed at furthering this sort of commitment as encroachments on individual prerogatives.

To be further clear, what is being referred to here, by using derivatives of the word federalism, is not the structural arrangement of the states and central government of the US.  Yes, federalism calls for a non-central arrangement of government.  That, by its nature, does include, some central entity and more local entities while withholding complete sovereignty from anyone level of governance.  But what is of more importance, is the necessary rationales for such an arrangement.   

As stated earlier in this blog, “… those processes [refer] to modes of political behavior that furthers a federated citizenry which include[s] healthy doses of social capital and civic humanism.”[4]  And such qualities presuppose a viable communal society in which its members are disposed to collaborate and cooperate in their pursuits of common endeavors broadly defined.  This is what Elazar calls a federal union’s processes.

And however one defines the terms, one can readily see that current levels of polarized politics – or tribalism, as some refer to what is going on – stands smack in the way of a people holding the necessary binding values and attitudes to pull off this active level of engagement.  To what extent is that?  Just visualize one holding a partnership in any aggregate effort such as in a marriage or a business.  It would not be based on some transaction or set of transactions, but on commitments.  How much indifference or nonchalance would such an endeavor sustain?  Not much. 

And that can go for a national unions as well.  Look around; is this nation on a dangerous path to disunity?  It almost happened before – admittedly for other reasons – and was saved by a bloody civil war.  And this writer believes that part of this current story – one mostly ignored – is how the nation’s civics education program is failing to instill – or more inoffensively stated, to encourage – the necessary disposed emotions and beliefs. 

He cannot see how true solutions to this polarization – in the long term – can be achieved without addressing the shortcomings of the nation’s civics education program.  One should remember that one cannot count on natural tendencies or rational calculations; it has to depend on its citizens learning how to be committed to others and on its people holding the necessary values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge to pull it off.  And according to Brooks, such unions depend on love.

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[1] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House), 34.

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, 2 (March 1, 1991), 231-254.

[3] Cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker writes of this and entails the practical realities resource scarcities have on this evolutionary trait.  See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).

[4] A political landscape that first promotes social capital, a la Robert D. Putnam, does so by encouraging an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.  It promotes civic humanism, as described by Isaac Kramnick, by encouraging among the citizenry that each citizen be a political actor who realizes his/her fulfilment is attained through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.

A DEFICIENT CURRICULUM

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

By way of reviewing many of the postings of the past year, this blog of late has recounted what they have to say over the dysfunctional state of civics education.  Dysfunctionality here is defined as how distant, conceptually, the civics curriculum of the nation has veered away from federalist aims and goals.  The focus in this blog has been on the textbooks that most American government teachers employ at the high school level.  The shortcomings that those books exhibit can also be found in the middle school civics textbooks as well.

          In addition to the textbooks, the reader can check out other evidential documents in a report this writer offers online.[1]  That evidence portrays what civics educators, particularly those holding powerful positions at the district, state, or national levels, want to accomplish in civics classrooms.  This posting reports what this writer judges those aims and goals are and their consequences.

          Their overall bias is to continue a curricular thrust that began in the mid twentieth century mark.  That is to promote a language and tone in instruction that relies on a “scientific,” objectified approach.  Despite various promises such an approach claims – an unbiased view and methodology by which to approach the subject matter – the overall content derived from such language does have detrimental consequences. 

A term that captures these consequences is anti-federalist messaging.  Or stated more descriptively, this messaging communicates lessons that work to degrade the partnership qualities that the US Constitution establishes.  Instead of promoting a more communal, inter relying nature of citizenship, what is communicated is a consumerist role for each citizen – one in which he/she participates, to various degrees, in a competitive process for favorable public policy. 

As such, each citizen’s attention focuses on advancing personal interests, much as one does in the various economic markets in which one participates.  And as such, the approach exhibits a natural rights view of governance and politics in which each member of the populous defines his/her personal values, goals, and, therefore, interests. 

To do so, the curriculum pursues a set of goals.  To begin, it limits its descriptions and explanations to the structural, procedural, and functional accounts of the various elements of the political system.  Some of those elements exist outside government (interest groups, political parties, etc.) and some within government (the various branches of government, various departments, agencies of the bureaucracy, etc.).  These elements are presented as the necessary, objectified elements which allow the grand system of competition to exist. 

They also provide an overall view of government as having this refereeing role as the various competitors go about their efforts to gain favorable results.  That is, the curriculum presents government as agent, but does not really give students a realistic explanation as to how power among the competitors outside or within government works to determine winners and losers.

          This curriculum does reasonably cover the “waterfront” of the various elements that do exist and play the various roles entailed in this grand competitive arena.  And one can attribute to the curriculum a sincere effort to communicate that information that a knowledgeable citizen needs to at least get started in his/her seeking favorable public policy. 

As continually pointed out, the information is primarily structural in nature.  It lacks, though, the human qualities one associates with influence and, therefore, what it takes to win.  While it almost totally ignores feedback or reaction to issued policies (no small omission), this writer has little to complain about with what is offered.  He views that the curriculum and its offerings, textbooks and other materials, as great information sources that could be employed in a more comprehensive approach. 

Yes, a curriculum and its materials can be more federalist in nature, but a realistic expectation of changing what is to what should be is overwhelming and the needs for a more useful civics program cannot wait.  The answer, therefore, needs to be in changing the mindset of teachers in how they see the content, as opposed to the teaching styles they employ in the classroom.

          One should keep in mind Daniel Elazar’s reasons[2] for studying governance and politics.  One reason is to understand why politics manifests itself as it does.  At least, what exists in classrooms provides students with a good sense of who is involved and where they are involved in making governmental and political decisions.  It gives students a sense of how things get done.  But this coverage, at best, is simply too superficial even if the materials – specifically textbooks – are bulky and heavy.

And in terms of Elazar’s concerns for justice and civility, this curriculum, as it is currently practiced, is seriously deficient.  A curriculum that reflects a natural rights view cannot meet the challenges the current political environment presents to the nation.  That view simply ignores, to a serious degree, the communal, collaborative, and mutuality qualities this polity needs to enhance.  It is too self-centered to encourage the national partnership to function as such and be able to advance itself in a healthy fashion.

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[1] As a reminder, the online site referred to can be found at the URL, https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSQxMfz-ILTNUq-qUXwCK-VjkQ55HWCY7lj6tCmAaaH53Z2B8jQfmhb_cfvaSbXr-4U6nQb1p4wdLJB/pub .

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

THE TEXTBOOK EFFECT

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

This writer, through a series of postings, dated from May 15 to June 26, 2020, provides a review of how the established national entities of civics education have viewed that subject matter.  Those entities include leading textbook publishers and the Center for Civics Education.  That view(s) can be detected in the form of standards such organizations issue and in the content one can find in the leading textbooks adopted in the various states to be used in classroom instruction.[1] 

In general, this writer used two sets of questions to guide his study.  But before sharing those questions, it should be stated that he was attempting to test a hypothesis, i.e., current civics education, as practiced in American classrooms, is guided by the natural rights view of governance and politics.  And the natural rights view promotes several qualities:  scientific language and methodology, reductionism, objectified analysis, and a general avoidance of normative questioning and reporting.

To informally test this hypothesis, in terms of textbooks, the following general questions were used in reviewing two popular publications: 

·       Do the books convey natural rights’ descriptions or explanations of the various aspects of governance or politics?  If so, how?

·       Do they entice students by being relevant or entertaining in some way?  If so, how?

·       And do they relate to some federalist values or concerns such as political interactions that can be described as communal and collaborative? 

This first set of questions identifies a direction or a general realm of interest this writer wanted to pursue in looking at the evidence he identified.  But to actually address the hypothesis, he applied the following:

·       Do they, the textbooks, describe politics in an amoral fashion? 

·       Do they describe citizens as consumers of public services and ignore or avoid mentioning them as being federated to promote the common good? 

·       Are political interactions basically treated in isolated fashion in that only the immediate rewards and punishments are considered?  That is, do they employ reductionist foci in their descriptions and explanations? 

·       Are issues of justice or civility ignored or at best assumed to be in place as the books review various competitive situations that politics entails?

To do his review, he looked at two popular textbooks used at the high school level, Magruder’s American Government[2]and Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action.[3]  For each he randomly selected five paragraphs and asked the above questions to analyze the content of the books.  He reported the content of those paragraphs, their context within the books, and an evaluation of their content by informally using the above questions.

He found the samples indicate various qualities and, from them, derived several conclusions.  They are:

·       Both textbooks used basically the same tone and language.  That is, they employ a matter-of-fact reporting style.  Reflecting a scientific language, it is objectified and, in the case of Glencoe, supply a good deal of statistics to convey derived conclusions that the book is making (Magruder does not provide such quantified information to any meaningful degree).

·       They both avoid any call for students to become active or involved with the various issues identified and described in their accounts.  Instead, the focus is on the structural elements of either the national government (little attention is given to state and local government) or on certain elements in the political system that exist outside of the government (such as in political parties).

·       Without using the term, citizens are portrayed as consumers of governmental services.  As such, they ignore the “of” and “by” roles Lincoln bestows on American citizens, essential roles in a republic.  That is, they do not encourage or explain how Americans can fulfill these other partnering roles that the Constitution establishes.

·       What issues these books address are what the professional literature calls “controversial” issues.  That is, they are issues that garner a good deal of current interest among the citizenry.  They are not chosen because of some normative standard beyond their “popularity.”  In other words, they are not chosen due to some affront to any given standards of moral principles.  As such, the treatment of the issues is only concerned with justice and civility as coincidental factors, not as their justification to be included for consideration.

·       And, with the above-mentioned consumer approach, the books express an individual perspective – how each identified person is affected – and little concern is expressed in terms of collectives or communal interests.

Overall, the textbooks are true to a natural rights view with its bias for science, objectivity, and utilization of a non-normative tone and language.

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[1] Elsewhere, he has critiqued the civics standards issued by the National Council for the Social Studies.  See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).

[2] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s American Government (Boston, MA:  Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2019).

[3] Richard C. Remy, Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action (New York, NY:  McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010).

CONCERNS IN A REVIEW

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

A recurring claim this blog makes is that textbooks, more than any other factor, determine the curriculum of secondary courses.[1]  And in American government high school courses, two textbooks dominate that market.  They are Magruder’s American Government[2]and Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action.[3]  And just to round what seems relevant, the choice of such books is made by school district and state officials through an adoption process.

This blog has presented over a number of postings an informal report as to the content of those books and how well the books meet federalist concerns.  This and the following postings will review the main points of that report.  If the reader cares to pursue this topic, there is an online site that presents a complete version of the report and can be found at the URL, https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSQxMfz-ILTNUq-qUXwCK-VjkQ55HWCY7lj6tCmAaaH53Z2B8jQfmhb_cfvaSbXr-4U6nQb1p4wdLJB/pub .

          In terms of this review, the focus is on the language used in these textbooks.  To make this analysis, this blog has chosen to look at the 2019 edition of Magruder’s and the 2010 edition of Glencoe’s.  By looking at a random selection of paragraphs from each book, one can glean the tone and language each uses to describe and explain the various elements of the US political system.

But before commencing with this review some points should be made.  The reader should be clear about the logic the writer is employing in taking the steps he is taking.  First, he begins with the belief that the natural rights view of governance and politics has taken hold in America, particularly in its political culture.  This blog has provided evidence to support this belief.

Second, as cultural beliefs tend to do, that view has a strong influence on how the various institutions of society see politics and that includes the educational institution.  That influence is most directly felt in the nation’s civics classrooms.  And as such, that influence affects which textbooks will be deemed acceptable.

Therefore, a hypothesis one can logically draw from this backdrop is that the content of those chosen textbooks will reflect the natural rights’ view of governance and politics.  Further, one can detect that bias in the tone and choice of terminology or language those books employ.  That, in short, explains why this review looks at the random choice of paragraphs extracted from these two textbooks.

More concretely, one can ask of these books:

·       Do they describe politics in an amoral fashion? 

·       Do they describe citizens as consumers of public services and ignore or avoid mentioning them as being federated to promote the common good? 

·       Are political interactions basically treated in isolated fashion in that only the immediate rewards and punishments are considered? 

·       Are issues of justice or civility ignored or at best assumed to be in place as the books review various competitive situations that politics entail? 

These questions reflect federalist attributes that advocates of federation theory favor.

And underlying these questions, an advocate of federation theory might ask about a nagging concern emanating from yet another construct, critical theory.  Advocates of critical theory advise people to look at more cynical motives.  No, not the motives of teachers, but of school officials found at school district offices, state departments of education, and the federal department of education.  Critical theorists generally claim that such key decisions as textbook choices are highly influenced by concerns over promoting pro-business messaging.

That is, officials will not leave such choices to chance or what is in current fashion but will ensure that a free market orientation will be advanced, not by direct promotion, but by such factors as tone and language.  To cite a leading critical theorist, Michael Apple, “They [education officials] see schools as connected to a marketplace.”[4]  Therefore, if one does find natural rights’ language and tone in those textbooks, one can see that as supporting this critical theory claim.

This writer is not a critical theorist.  But that does not preclude him from agreeing with some aspects of that view.  And, in terms of this claim, he tends to see that upper education officials do demand that the nation’s instructional biases be supportive of the economic powers of the day.  Effective in promoting that message is instructional content that assumes that the interests of students are furthered by participating in governmental interactions. 

Consequently, any employed materials, such as textbooks, will communicate how people succeed in gaining their political aims and goals which often reflect economic interests.  They aim to have students’ attention be focused on how political actors advance their interests.  But while advancing one’s interests is legitimate (assuming those interests don’t counter the common good), the nation’s constitutional makeup calls for more.  Summarizing what that means, two desired attributes come to mind:  social capital and civic humanism.

That being:

·       Social capital, at the societal level, is characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.[5]  And

·       Civic humanism, at the individual level, refers to a political being realizing his/her fulfilment through participation in public life and a concern for public good above selfish ends.[6] 

The messaging that would encourage this sort of society and citizen cannot be left to mild or vague messaging.  It has to be promoted head on with not an insistence on their acceptance – that wouldn’t work even if it were tried – but with appropriate questioning and problem-solving exercises in which students are called upon to pass judgment on situations challenging these valued qualities.

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[1] This might also be the case in elementary school but that’s beyond this writer’s knowledge.

[2] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s American Government (Boston, MA:  Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2019).

[3] Richard C. Remy, Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action (New York, NY:  McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010).

[4] Michael W.  Apple, “Educational Restructuring and the Neo-liberal and Neo-conservative Agendas:  Interview with Michael Apple,”  Curriculo sem Frontieiras, 1, 1 (January/June, 2001), accessed May 25, 2020, http://www.curriculosemfronteiras.org/vol1iss1articles/appleeng.pdf . 

[5] Robert D.  Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

[6] Isaac Kramnick,  “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.