THE MORALITY OF AN AMORAL VIEW

 

[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.]

Can a moral view that places moral questions to the discretion of each person, in effect, project far reaching moral standards on a vast array of issues?  At first consideration, this question poses an irony.  Moral standards, one would think, propose a set of “oughts.”  They tell people how to behave.  But if the individual is to decide what any standard that he/she will accept, then any such moral theory can only hint at a moral path.  But that overly simplifies things.

          First, to give this view a quality, one can easily see this approach as a form of liberty – the ability to live by one’s choices.  Observing the natural world, one sees that animals live by such a standard.  They do what they want – their morality is to do their own thing.  Applying this sense to humans, therefore, one can call that view of liberty a natural liberty.

With natural liberty, though, one restriction seems prudent.  In order to avoid the violence, one sees in nature, one needs to insist that natural liberty be constrained by people affording other people the same level of liberty.  In practical terms, that limits one’s choices by insisting that each person respects others’ rights.  As the adage states, “one has the right to wave his/her arms up to where another person’s nose starts.”  Animals are not appreciative of any such limitation, at least, not in terms of rights.  Yes, smaller animals regularly yield to larger animals, and in effect that limits their options, but morality is not what they are considering.

          But to get back to humans, this amoral sense – one that Machiavelli described – relies on a hefty moral sense.  Admittedly, it probably is best judged to be founded on moral positions of omission rather than commission.  To sustain a society that has a prevailing natural rights view, a certain approach to contentious situations needs to be defined and maintained.  Where these situations exist moral challenges tend to be most strident. 

What method can be adopted to avoid violence when political interests are in conflict?  A look at another area of possible contention or of opposing interests can be helpful.  That would be economic competition and the reliance on what Jonah Goldberg calls the “Miracle.”[1]  That would be free markets. 

That is, the application of market values and processes can be applied to other domains or arenas without applying extensive moral guideposts.  Markets have demonstrated a means of cooperation.  They are based on each person being free to pursue his/her interests with a minimal set of rules.  For the most part this approach can illustrate how a natural rights view can allow governing, politicking, and other social processes to proceed with minimal moral overview. 

And in doing so, this purportedly amoral view turns out to be a highly extensive moral view.  This posting attempts to describe this seemingly contradictory messaging.  At its base, the main message is that a view of governance and politics, at its core, cannot avoid a moral foundation, at least, in part.

And this value commitment expresses itself in a wide spectrum of public policies.  To summarize, by casting the political arena as one solely composed of consumer-citizens – a citizenry competing for public assets – as opposed to a square – where partners are expressing their individual views of what promotes the common good – it will strongly tend to bolster what one can readily see as a moral position. 

That moral stand would see as preferable a strong disposition, i.e., a reluctance to propose or support governmental initiatives or governmental solutions to societal problems.  If people approach politics from their limited set of personal interests, their concerns for societal problems become easily subject to such thinking as “free rider”-ship in which each depends on others to solve shared problems.

In short, such a view favors right-of-center (conservative) politics and degrades left-of-center (liberal) politics as this latter orientation imposes values on people.  Note, this conservatism is of the natural rights variety, not of the religious-parochial-traditional sort. 

How does it degrade liberal thinking?  Because it judges that efforts to advance the common good through legal means, would impose authoritative expression of values on individuals.  This imposition, therefore, is antithetical to the basic value orientation of the natural rights’ moral – or is it amoral? – view.

Any resulting legislated programs or criminal laws would generally reflect some moral expression by others. No, they do not radicalize this notion, but this sort of judgement does have a strong influence on natural rights advocates.

And one can see this bias expressed in the textbooks American secondary schools utilize.  This claim needs to be supported by evidence and future postings will provide a summary of such evidence.  But assuming such evidence exists, then this market-oriented approach has several consequences. 

·       First, it promotes a self-serving citizenry which runs counter to what the founders of the nation envisioned.  After all, the goal was for a more perfect union that included an improving general welfare. 

·       Second, it encourages a view of governance and politics as being a continuous succession of isolated confrontations in which rewards and punishments (costs) are calculated in short-term time dimensions. 

·       And third, it renders the study of politics to consumer issues at the hinderance of communal interests.  For example, such views place in low priority the needs of infrastructure improvement because the rewards are in the future while the costs are present.

Adding to this “valued” bias is a realization that the view caters to the way people naturally think.  They have by nature only a limited propensity to think altruistically.  They do have a natural tendency to concern themselves with the interests of those defined under the category of Us, but that’s where the concern naturally ends including any disposition to broaden who is included in the Us. 

To extend that concern, on two fronts (who is defined as Us and what one’s responsibilities are for others), one needs to be taught to embrace these concerns or perspectives.  And by logical deduction, this counters the natural rights’ bias.  But, to some meaningful extent, this concern constitutes, in the eyes of many, what citizenship is all about.  If that is true, one can readily accept that civics should encompass these issues and that, under the natural rights bias, these issues are being ignored because they are not as proactively valued as they should be.

Instead, the prevailing value is that they should not be.  And what about the evidence?  Starting with the next posting, a summary report of the prevailing textbooks will be offered.  A point should be remembered as the blog shares this information; textbooks, for all practical purposes, define the curriculum being taught in American schools.  This dependence is not by law, but by practice.  Unfortunately, most teachers see the textbook as informing them about what the curriculum is.  That is, they see their jobs as “teaching” the contents of those books.

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[1] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

MECHANICAL OR ORGANIC, WHO CARES?

[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.]

 The adoption of the political systems model as the prevailing, basic view of governance and politics in civics classrooms[1] has generated a contentious issue.  That is:  should the model’s use reflect a mechanical view, or should it reflect an organic view?  Admittedly, among civics educators, this issue does not keep them up at night.  But upon some reflection, at least by this writer, it should.

Historically, when that model first broke through during the fifties, it utilized a highly behavioral view of political activity.  That is, it narrowed its analysis of political interactions to the immediate factors of rewards and punishments at stake in any given political act or type of action.

One should keep in mind that by its very nature, political interactions have to do with vying interests competing for some asset – usually a public asset – in which the distribution of the asset is not applicable to a market process.  For example, the allocation of a highway to one community or another, would be such a competition.  Or the competition could be of an indirect nature, for example, whether a regulation should be written one way, or another, could mean millions of dollars at stake in a given industry.

So, with a purely behavioral approach, politics was more apt to be studied through the quantification of the various factors or variables relating to the questions political scientists ask.  They took on this approach to be able to develop predictable and explanatory theories of political phenomena – much like natural scientists with their studies of natural phenomena.  They were not able to accomplish that feat and this led to the realization that many political factors are not subject to the direct quantification that natural factors or variables are.   

As the sixties came and wore on, therefore, this approach was found to be wanting.  The realization was developed that a straight or pure version of behavioral studies more resembled or could be considered a “mechanical” approach to the study of politics.  Eventually, David Easton, the leading voice in the political systems school of thought, argued for a more “organic” approach.[2]

          The original model emphasized the input-conversion-output elements of the model.  Easton explained that this stimulus-response conceptualization needed to give way to a stimulus-organism-response view.  And to do this, another element needed to be emphasized, that being feedback.  Or, stated more descriptively, the model needs to take into account more aggressively how people in the polity react to output (which is usually governmental policies).

          Either way, by political science shifting to behavioral modeling, and its overall effort to resemble the natural sciences, it, through its protocols, focuses on stripping any emotional biases from its studies.  One of the main objections to traditional – usually historical – studies of politics was their likelihood of being biased accounts to the study of political developments. 

Therefore, a prominent, initial concern in adopting behavioral methods was how to objectify political studies.  In further shifting the analysis to take into account reactions or feedback – with all the emotional factors involved both on the part of subjects and observing scientists – normative factors came to be seen as necessary elements of what needed to be studied even if that meant objectification would be less possible or less stringent. 

          The political actor can no longer be perceived in a way that is akin to a pigeon in a Skinner experiment.  Does the subject vote for a candidate (does a pigeon peck at a lever) or not?  It turns out humans acting politically cannot be reduced to this level of objectification.  And this writer’s use of political science literature has led him to believe that that research is more productive and useful with a more encompassing view of governance and politics, i.e., one that takes into account feedback.

          But how has the shift affected civics education?  This blog has reviewed civics textbooks with this question in mind.[3]  Generally, that review found that those books do little to account for feedback; it is an element that is mostly ignored.  No, their descriptions of political behavior do not reduce it to descriptions or explanations as stark as Skinnerian studies, but one can note a definite disregard for the emotions involved. 

Therefore, one can judge that what the American civics curriculum, as betrayed in those textbooks, expose to the secondary students is a mechanical view.  But a distinction needs to be made.  The political system itself, under the more organic view, is seen as an organism.  And the system is made up of organisms, that being the individual members of a system. 

But at the systemic level, the system is an analogized organ entity; the members, if one is speaking of the people, are, of course, actual organ entities.  What a federalist would judge of this construct, even after this more humanizing change, is that the analogized portion of the model falls short and is somewhat bizarre.  They would ask:  why analogize? 

To them a political system is a partnership, and a partnership is real assuming that its partners are conscious of their status and that they are partners of their own volition.  And in this, the political systems model provides a disservice.  By being the model civics adopts, it seriously undermines the constitutional arrangement that document formally establishes among the American people by portraying the union as some made up concept.  In using the resulting textbooks, the onus is on educators to make this clear.

          Now, with that off this federation theory advocate’s chest, one point needs to be clarified, civics studies governance and politics and those two processes determine how sought-after, public assets are distributed.  An organic view – and more so, a federated view – relies on a more humane perspective when compared to a mechanical view. 

Therefore, by opting for a mechanical view, civics instruction loses the dramatic quality of politics as being the “art of the possible.”  Instead, a less than full human image is presented, and with that, an inevitable, misleading governmental role is promoted.  That is, it gives government a solely agency role – i.e., it is pictured as this grand entity fully controlled by the wishes of the electorate. 

Further, that electorate is pictured as citizens who all have equal voices – not as an ideal (that would be too unobjectified) – but as a reality.  In short, these books ignore the presence, makeup, and function of power – what it is, how it is acquired, how it is exercised, how it is increased, how it is lost, and how it is maintained are questions these books mostly ignore.  Any reference to power is merely incidental to some event or condition they describe and treat it as contextual matter.

          And a textbook on governance and politics that avoids these questions, is an account that not only falls way short of what is involved, but also plays a role in setting up students to become disinterested, disappointed, and indifferent adult citizens.  Yes, a successful rendering of these books’ contents will set up students to understand what the popular press reports.  But as to the reasons of why political developments take the shape they do, they, as students today and as their adult versions tomorrow, are apt to be clueless.

          Evidence of this can be the following:  when a politician claims to set out to “drain the swamp” and that is interpreted as depopulating the government of civil servants who act apolitically, a serious level of misunderstanding is occurring.  People with that level of misperception are ripe for being subjects of unfounded arguments and believers of baseless conspiracy theories.  The reader might look around; the nation is there.

P.S.:  Happy election day; please vote.

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[1] See “Inputs, Outputs, and Feedback,” March 13, 2020, accessed November 1, 2020, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_03_08_archive.html .

[2] Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, 11-31.

[3] A future posting will summarize that review.

REINFORCING FUNCTIONS

 

[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 funny thing about the relationship between civics education and political science is that the practitioners of both fields do not give the relationship much thought.  This is doubly true for political scientists, but at least civics teachers, to be certified, need to earn credits in political science.  But despite this apparent indifference, there seem to be two functions that relationship serves.

They take the following form:  political science provides information that civics courses use, and civics courses prepare students to expect objectified information when the topic is politics – an assumption contemporary political science favors.  To find evidence of how these functions are satisfied in civics education, one can look at civics’ textbooks. 

In practical terms, those textbooks tell civics teachers what to teach and an overview of their content is very telling as to how these reinforcing functions are performed.  Generally, the effect of these books and the related instruction are to convey to students a consumerist view of citizenship.  That is, the typical American, as depicted in these books, is a person with a limited concern about what governments are or what they do.  Their topics center on how the various entities within the polity compete to attain favorable governmental services.

That is, the descriptions are akin to describing a customer at some retail store.  This is a far cry from the image one gets from Lincoln’s refrain:  “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  It, in other words, ignores the partnership view that the Constitution establishes.  Partners do not limit their concerns to what an enterprise can provide them on a given day.

They instead have a longer-term view, and that view holds that the health of the enterprise is extremely important.  They express this concern in their views, pronouncements, and strategies about how they behave within the partnership.  If one holds to the ideal expressed in Lincoln’s statement, then one sees this lack of normative concern in civics instruction as a shortcoming. 

In general, civics textbooks do not, to a meaningful degree, advance a partnership sense of citizenship.  Not only do these books avoid normative issues, but given they are based on the political systems model, they also neglect an essential element of that model, that being the “feedback loop.”  That is, these books neglect looking at how people react to governmental policies.

To explain this element, it falls in line with how organisms react to stimuli.  Early utilization of the political systems model received criticism because it relied too heavily on the behavioralist notion of “reward/punishment” determinants or as the field calls it:  “stimulus-response.”  Simply stated, it tended to see political behavior as merely a calculated process by which a person attempts to maximize rewards and minimize punishments. 

That early criticism summarily pointed out that its approach was a mechanical view of politics.  By emphasizing inputs, conversion, outputs, the use of the model did not sufficiently provide attention to a subject’s feelings, motivations, and the other subjective aspects of a person’s awareness and reaction.

But, by shifting more attention to the feedback element, and the array of emotions that a reaction might include, that would give the model a needed organic sense or view.  As a result, David Easton eventually called for these other factors to be taken into account in political studies.[1]    

But civics textbooks ignore this feedback feature and, therefore, instead of an organic view, these books retain the model’s initial mechanistic view – machines don’t react, they simply follow the physical laws of nature.  This in effect renders these books as giving governance and politics a dehumanized portrayal as they avoid subjective information and, therefore, tend not to account for the controversies that naturally arise in everyday politics. 

The view, instead, limits itself to describing entity X seeking governmental service, Y, by performing Z process.  Missing is the more intriguing story of how the actors, reflecting on a slew of motivations, dispense rewards and punishments by governments and citizens (e.g., favorable policies by government or political donations by citizens) in an ongoing process over time.  As such, there is little in these books on how the participants of the system are either motivated or dissuaded to behave in the various options open to them. 

There are various areas in which this focus on science, described in previous postings, has meaningful effects on how civics textbooks approach their subject matter.  In relation to this just addressed issue, how and why political actors act as they do, the first of these areas has to do with how the very acts of politics are defined. 

Starting with Harold Lasswell’s seemingly flippant definition – politics is determining “who get what, when, how” – this definition promotes that above mentioned consumerist character and it loses, to a meaningful degree, the assumed overall motivation to advance the interests of the common good or the seeking of that “perfect union.”  But it took a couple of decades, starting in the thirties, for Lasswell’s view to take hold in the fifties. 

That eventuality can be marked with the contribution of Easton.  The popularization of the political systems model is attributed to him.  He commented extensively on the implications of this model, but at its base what one carries away is an explicit image of a transactional system. 

Actors are motivated by self-interest and mostly engage in tit-for-tat interactions.  They seek rewards and avoid punishments.  While in actuality, this basic pattern leads to complicated consequences – e.g., mounting advantages by those who have inordinate levels of political assets – the basic process is relatively easy to accept because under a natural rights view it is easy to understand.

And as such, it becomes a convenient framework for civics textbooks.  Here, within their covers, one finds an overall motivational view for politics, a series of descriptions of participants in the resulting competition which characterizes politics, and descriptions of the organizational set-ups in which those participants function. 

Resulting textbooks, in summary, have a recurring format:  there are the basic rules of the political game (early chapters), the input groupings (the second set of chapters), and the conversion structures (primarily the latter chapters).  What is not included are the output/feedback aspects, which are mostly ignored.  At best, a student so instructed turns out to be an informed observer of the nightly news.

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[1] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.

A SHIFT IN THE CLASSROOM

 

[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.]

When considering the role civics education plays in society, one must consider the context in which that role is played.  While this contextual relationship might be observed in any nation, the fact that the American political culture has taken a natural rights view as its dominant perspective, the political culture has influenced how civics is seen and how it is taught in a particular way.

          The effect of the natural rights view makes itself felt both directly in the content of civics’ subject matter and indirectly in that subject matter’s main source of content – that being political science.  That is, since the 1950s, that academic discipline has reflected this shift by its adoption of the political systems model and its utilization of behavioral, “scientific” methodologies.[1]  These changes have seriously encouraged civics to present to secondary students a highly structural and procedural image of American governance.  This posting describes how that has happened.

          An overall reason for this turn in political science and civics education reflects the admired advancements in the natural sciences.  And those advancements seemed to culminate with the space program that affected the imaginations of many Americans.  Their imaginations were bolstered by the dual effects of pride over US’ accomplishments, but also by fear, given the early successes by the country’s main foe, the Soviet Union.

With the launching of Sputnik, the political leaders of the US were determined to catch up to the Soviet’s early lead in space exploration.  Beginning in the fifties, they funded various initiatives among a number of institutions in American life including education.  And that commitment proved to have a profound effect not only on science and math education, but also on social studies as well.

          With this concern, the national social studies establishment attempted to promote the “New Social Studies” which called for the utilization of science protocols to instructional strategies – even to the study of history.  While these instructional coaxing proved for the most part to be unsuccessful, the content of social studies subject matter did experience a move toward presenting objectified-based content while shying away from normative issues.  The new focus became “what is” or “what was” instead of “what should be” or “what should have been.” 

This change is in line with the natural rights’ belief that normative decisions belong to the individual and efforts, especially by a governmental entity – such as public schools – should keep an arm’s length distance from such issues.  This reminds the writer of the relatively unintrusive message the Obama Administration promoted for good dietary practices it issued to the nation’s school systems in 2010 and the reaction that message caused.  The Administration was in that instance accused of conducting an indoctrinating effort. 

It seems that in the eyes of that President’s detractors, promoting good eating habits – to a nation that is experiencing serious levels of obesity among young people – crosses a line between what is legitimate, objective educational presentations, and what is illegitimate, normative or value-based presentations.

Civics is charged with teaching students the knowledge and skills they need to be effective citizens in a democracy.  What “effectiveness” means seems to be the point of contention.  Natural rights advocates limit its meaning to the structural/procedural aspects to what citizens need to know to fulfill the basic function of citizenship. 

That would include being knowledgeable about the “popular” issues of the day (the ones drawing the most attention) and how a citizen performs basic expectations – such as voting and paying taxes.  Yes, there is the aim that students at least at this point in their lives be exposed to the various structural elements of the political system (both those in and out of government).  That effort is a rundown of the system’s groups, departments, agencies, and of the major processes (such as the formulation of laws) that the system conducts.

What is avoided is any discussion about how those activities should be conducted even if a potential topic or issue can be defined as harming or potentially harming the health of the polity such as in the above example of obesity.  This limited concern – not limited material, the typical civics textbook is an amply-sized book – leaves controversies behind.

And then there is the question of what should be asked of students when they are presented the information their civics courses contain.  Whether a civics teacher uses a didactic mode of instruction – one that basically dispenses information – or inquiry – one that poses questions or problems for students to answer or solve – for a student to be an effective citizen, the student needs to reflect on the material presented or discovered.  Short of that, whatever information is dispensed tends to be quickly forgotten.[2] 

It turns out, forgetting “stuff” is what people tend to do.  Research seems to indicate that the mental exercise of encoding[3] – a necessary mental prerequisite – leads people to remember information.  The process of solving problems or seeking moral justifications or condemnations naturally depends on the mind encoding relevant information.  By calling for such mental manipulations, inquiry instructional strategies naturally lead to encoding as information is conceptualized and then compartmentalized in one’s thinking. 

Purely didactic teaching, on the other hand, does not in itself provide an exercise that demands active encoding while the instruction takes place.  Students usually are expected to take notes and, at some future time, review them and commit them to memory.  What encoding takes place is incidental to that process while inquiry sessions demand simultaneous encoding while any instruction or related investigating takes place.

So, even if a teacher primarily dispenses information, to increase the likelihood that information is remembered, much less make it meaningful, that teacher needs to find ways to have those students encode the information they are given. 

For example, a didactic lesson can begin by the teacher presenting the students with an “essay” question answerable by implementing the subsequent information the teacher presents.  This would not only introduce the lesson, but help students begin thinking of why the presented information is important according to a concern reflected in the initial question.

And this brings one to the cultural relationships entailed in civics between its main source of information and its efforts to prepare students to be effective citizens.  That is, there is a reinforcing relationship between political science and how civics is practiced in American schools.  The next posting will take a look at that relationship and how it affects the quality of that instruction in American secondary schools.

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[1] One can find an “appendix” chapter describing and explaining this development online; see  https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] See Kendra Cherry, “4 Explanations for Why We Forget,” Very Well Mind, n.d., accessed October 25, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/explanations-for-forgetting-2795045 , for a description on the importance of encoding in remembering information.

[3] Encoding means that a mind formulates information in a form it can translate and consequently process.  Even at this basic level, the mind must direct toward the stimulus in question some basic reflection and, of course, the more the information is reflected upon the more firmly it is encoded.  See “Encoding,” AlleyDog.com, n.d., accessed October 26, 2020, https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Encoding#:~:text=The%20process%20of%20breaking%20the,and%20later%20retrieval%20is%20encoding.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

 

[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.]

 

Anyone who has taught in a common secondary classroom knows that there are meaningful limitations on how much attention he/she can give an individual student.  One can observe that there is room for some of that and meaningful relationships might emerge as a teacher addresses a particular student’s needs.  Their interaction can even lead to lifelong friendships; this writer can attest to that eventuality.  But this is the exception, not the rule.

          And beyond that, as the last posting points out, that teacher’s expertise might not even approach the needs of some students; they are of such a nature that those students need professional, psychological help.  In addition, given the number of students assigned to a teacher and the arrangement in which the teacher faces twenty to thirty students at a time (sometimes even more), that teacher cannot provide the resources – in terms of time or skills – many students need.

          But that is not to say teachers are of no consequence.  And a teacher has some tools at his/her disposal.  These tools relate to various occasions.  There are the one-on-one conversations, but there are also what a teacher decides to present in his/her lessons.  This includes the subjects he/she presents and the questions he/she asks the students to consider.

          And in this, civics lessons, and beyond them, social studies lessons, offer many suitable topics.  Therefore, there are many opportunities to bring up cases of how people dealing with maturing issues handle various situations and challenges.  They might be situations people face in either contemporary times or from historical situations.  Those situations can stretch from tort cases in courtrooms to presidential decision-making in the White House – yes, even presidents need to deal with maturation issues concerning themselves and those with whom they deal.

          The resulting lessons can be geared to address what students are facing.  This tension that characterizes what young people face – their demand for more freedom and the expectations of the social arrangements in which they find themselves – is usually at the heart of many social conflicts.  And of course, social conflicts serve to be the “meat and potatoes” of a civics curriculum.  After all, civics looks at politics and politics is about who gets what, when, and how.  Those decisions are the product of contentious competitions in the political arena.

          A teacher so disposed to offer such lessons should keep in mind that the object of such effort is to engage the students’ reasoning and reflection.  This is probably the most important component of such lessons.  The main obstacle to students being able to maturate is their reluctance to reflect and to avoid using their reason to any depth.  That, according to Jonathan Haidt,[1] proves to be an initial stumbling block with most people at times when issues arise.  The easiest reaction is to merely respond to obvious elements of the situation in question and allow their feelings to hold sway.  That is to be reflexive, not reflective.

          And all of this has to do with the consciousness of those who are affecting or are being affected by the challenge in question.  Those consciousnesses tend to blanket the situation instead of being targeted at the factors relating to the case put before them.  Such thinking goes to either/or options and misses the nuances reality hold. 

Part of the challenge a teacher faces is to make those situations relevant to the student.  Beginning with issues that affect the student or people he/she knows, they help teachers make his/her lesson relatable to the student’s feelings.  It’s not that lessons should avoid student emotions – they motivate a person to take note – but to avoid those emotions from taking over and preventing the student from giving the situation sufficient thought.

          This last suggestion might be a challenge.  The teacher often needs to analyze what it is he/she is attempting to portray and find that aspect of it that does relate to students.  This is often an obvious choice, but sometimes a bit of research or imagination helps as the teacher finds that case study or statistic or newspaper item that has or depicts information relatable to the students.  Most important topics provide such an angle if the teacher takes the time to find it.

          While this blog supports the use of federated theory – as opposed to natural rights theory – to guide curricular choices, the natural rights view can provide opposing perspectives and arguments a teacher might employ to encourage discussion.  And those who promote the natural rights view have legitimate insights to share. 

A recurring concern natural rights advocates cite is how government policy restrict illegitimately or unreasonably individuals from doing what they want to do.  Yes, the majority, through legislative action, can at times do so.  A lot of the liberalization that emanated from the Warren Court, for example, were overdue.  What this shows is that reality and justice can be highly nuanced. 

Good civics and social studies lessons pose difficult dilemmas that one needs to think about so as to arrive at well-grounded and satisfying positions.  What is promoted here is not indoctrination, but a theory that not only identifies those dilemmas but offers a teacher suggested questions he/she can ask students.

There is the federated way of seeing things and there is the natural rights way of seeing things.  There is the communal way of approaching a problem and there is the transactional way of doing so.  An ongoing stream of questioning can be founded on an overarching question:  What is the more mature way to proceed between the options each of these views offers?  That could be the recurring, fundamental question – in various forms and over various issues – a teacher might pose to students.

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[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:  Pantheon Books, 2012).

NOT PSYCHOLOGISTS, BUT …

[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 carry on with a look at Hegel’s views on people maturing described in the last posting, that philosopher is known more for his historical-dialectic model (and noted for its effect on Karl Marx).  His maturing model, like his historical one, emphasizes contradictions and conflicts and warns that there is no smooth road to adulthood.

          And such tensions naturally have their problematic consequences on the social arrangements within which they occur.  If one keeps in mind how social arrangements of just about any sort depend on people actually getting along and behaving in ways that bolster cooperation and collaboration, one can readily see that maturing issues can be important.  They are of such importance that one can easily find cultural expressions that look at situations in which these tensions become intense – see movies like West Side Story[1]or Rebel Without a Cause.[2]

          In addition, these tensions feed and are fed by dysfunctional political movements.  Currently, that would be the level of tribalism in which issues are defined – not necessarily openly – by “identity” perceptions which, in turn, cater to the natural “Us vs. Them” biases people are apt to express.  And what this points out is that professional educators, to address this shortcoming as it affects good citizenship, need a well-founded understanding of what is happening with these young people. 

No, they don’t need to be psychologists, but to be effective they do have to have a good sense of what these tensions are and how they work themselves into how young people see reality and strive to satisfy what they perceive they want. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to indicate – given the general levels of narcissism – that they are not doing a very good job of addressing this challenge.[3]  Leading fellow educators toward better results could naturally be civics educators and beyond them, social studies educators in general.

Those educators could start by reviewing those concepts and values that highly relate to the underlying issues involved, and no issues are more involved than those relating to freedom.  And here, a distinction is helpful although in the public media one never hears that this distinction even exists.  That would be about how people define freedom. 

As the previous posting pointed out, the young person coming to terms with how they seek their freedom from authority figures (parents, school personnel, and other authorities), are heavily influenced by prevailing views of freedom or liberty.  And as this blog has pointed out numerous times, that would be the natural rights view and its promotion of natural liberty.[4] 

But in the history of humankind, there have been various views of freedom and that can be said for the US.  And in the US, the main division relates to the distinction between what prevails today, natural liberty, and what prevailed in the years before World War II, federal liberty.  The former bolsters the general sense of doing one’s own thing and the latter incorporates a sense of doing what one should do without legal or other constraints. 

And this other view introduces, beyond market values, the values of some moral construct, namely a federated morality.[5]  That morality highlights as a requisite the responsibilities of being cooperative, collaborative, and communal.  It encourages one to develop a respect for equality, not just in relation to the law, but in the conditions under which people live.  Further, those conditions should meet some reasonable levels.  And, in line with these concerns, one should respect people being able to act from their own volition to do what is right.

Hegelian notions lead to a two-pronged approach by those who want to affect this maturing process.  On one plane, they need to deal with the reality of what exists, the conditions they observe.  On a second plane, they are taking into account the historical context in which they live – and today, what prevails is the current global economic world that, despite possible policies to the contrary, exists.  And this affects their consciousness which, in turn, relies on mental visions or biases such as advanced organizers in people’s cognitive makeups. 

All of this is not at the conscious level, there are also subconscious forces at work.  That’s right; it’s a bit complicated indeed.  And it’s hard for a given person to become a responsible citizen.  The easier path is just to react to events.  Yet the responsible path, the one that bolsters the probabilities to a more productive, happier future, is to reflect on what is at stake with a given challenge, what is a moral reaction, and what leads to a better result for all involved. 

Why?  Because beyond being moral, it leads to positive reciprocal interactions, positive sentiments towards others, positive access to the communal assets and good wishes, and to positive self-fulfillment of who one truly is.  And this revelation in general terms is not so complicated or mysterious.  

It turns out that adopting this view as an overall understanding and as a plan increases the chances of success in most interactions.  Upon such successes, one falls into the habit of taking into account the interests of those involved.  That is, it pays in a variety of ways for people to be more reflective instead of being merely reflexive.[6]

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[1] Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (directors), West Side Story, United Artists, 1961.

[2] Nicholas Ray (director), Rebel Without a Cause, Warner Brothers, 1955.

[3] Jean M. Twenge, and W. Keith Campbell.  The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.  New York, NY: Free Press, 2009.  This writer believes that this shortcoming is more a product of systemic factors rather than professional malpractice by educators.

[4] That would be the view that everyone has the right to determine their values and goals and the right to pursue those values and goals short of interfering with others to do likewise.

[5] A review of this moral code can be found in Toward a Federated Nation.  See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).

[6] One can be reflective and immoral as morality is defined in the prevailing social arrangement.  In dramatic form, as an example, one can see the behaviors of the “godfather” in the movie, The Godfather.  There, the Don, Vito Corleone, constructed his morality based on family loyalty.  Here, the tragedy lies in this character not accepting a social environment in which the level of “Us” goes beyond not only the family or the region in which he lives but incorporates a nation-state.  Surely, his was not a federal morality even within the family.  There, there was a hierarchical arrangement with the Don at the top instead of an arrangement in which its members were federated among themselves.  Within his moral purview, though, he did act in a reflected fashion.  See Francis Ford Coppola (director), The Godfather (the film), Paramount Pictures, 1972.