EITHER/OR AS A PROFESSIONAL OBSTACLE

I believe that a prevailing problem with the way people think is their tendency to engage in what I call dichotomous thinking. That is, they tend to see reality as being either one thing or another. Philosophers write of this tendency. They use the term duality or either/or. The problem is that reality is seldom so simple, especially if you are discussing or considering public policy. Unfortunately, the fate of civics education is affected by this tendency. I referred to it in a previous posting, Convoluted Division,¹ which reported how within the field of social studies and civics, there are those who advance the aim of promoting the heritage of the American political system and those who advance a reconstructive agenda, as in we need to fundamentally change our political approach toward the distribution of public goods and public assets – such as education. The division is made up of conservative groups – backing the heritage side – and critical theorists – backing the reconstructive side. So, if we take this dichotomy at face value, one is claiming that one is either for teaching American political values or one is arguing for fundamental changes in our political way of doing things. On the face of it, it seems silly and childish.

But what happens if you are for both? Take me, for example. I believe we should teach and encourage adoption of many of our basic political values such as our love of freedom, equality, and liberty. At the same time, I believe that there are aspects of our accepted political mode of operation that need to be changed. For example, I believe that the way we run elections – especially how we draw Congressional districts – needs changing. This, by the way, is a fundamental change, one that needs a constitutional amendment. But this incidence of dichotomous thinking – heritage vs. reconstruction – stands, to a significant degree, in the way of addressing many of the issues that face civics education. Kathleen Hall Jamieson² writes about this very dichotomy. Let me cite, from Jamieson's article, the writings of Amy Goodman, who captures how the division manifests itself through more specific issues:

The first issue is whether civic education that is publicly mandated must be minimal so that parental choice can be maximal. The second issue concerns the way in which publicly subsidized schools should respond to the increasingly multicultural character of societies. The third issue is whether democratic education should try to cultivate cosmopolitan or patriotic sentiments among students.³

My response to all of these issues is yes to both sides of each issue. The most difficult issue is the first: how far should a school go to promote values at the expense of those values advanced at home? No matter how one feels about this issue, one is probably able to accept some limitations on the values parents can instill as well as those promoted at school. Neither source of instruction, for example, should promote a criminal life style. But where the limits exist is a serious concern and it does no good to approach such issues in an “either/or” frame of mind. The same goes for the other issues. If one questions extreme efforts to promote the American heritage, to the degree that instruction addresses only American contributions to democratic thought and glosses over such practices as slavery, one should not be seen as an advocate of critical theory or the reconstruction of American society. Yet a lot of the professional discourse within the field of social studies and civics education takes on this type of exchange.

Ronald Evans has called this state of affairs in the field as the “social studies wars.” The problem is that the field cannot advance when one side of this divide, the academic contingency, has so overwhelming adopted the reconstruction position. Critical theorists control to a large degree what is happening in our research facilities on our higher education campuses. The rest of the field, the bureaucracy and the teaching corps, is mostly inattentive to the quarrel. The other side, those who promote the American heritage side, is made up of special interests such as certain church groups, conservative foundations, conservative political operatives, or ideologically committed citizens. They have a political agenda and some have significant financial resources to bolster their positions. The Fordham Foundation publication gives a flavor of the rhetoric that this side spews:

Evidence also accumulated that, in the field of social studies itself, the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Its leaders were people who had plenty of grand degrees and impressive titles but who possessed no respect for Western civilization; who were inclined to view America's evolution as a problem for humanity rather than mankind's last best hope … ⁴

While the description of academics might be somewhat accurate, the effect on social studies in our schools is way overstated. As a matter of fact, Jamieson cites research that amply documents the lack of any effect academics have on the teacher corps. As a former teacher, I can assure you that during my twenty-five years in two different school districts (between the years 1972-2000), I was fairly unaware that there was an academic literature that promoted the reconstruction side of the debate. For that matter, beyond hearing of some efforts around the country to influence social studies instruction by the occasional conservative group, I was not aware of any successful attempts to promote the heritage side of the debate. For my part, I vigorously pursued a teaching approach that attempted to have students “critically” question American practices that flew in the face of democratic ideals – not as a way to reconstruct our society, but as a way to instill accepted American values such as freedom – and I can testify that I was encouraged to do so by in-service training and other professional literature. It wasn't until I became a doctoral student that I was aware of the vehement nature of the “social studies wars.”

1Posted November 25, 2013.

2Jamieson, K. H. (2013). The challenges facing civic education. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Spring, 142 (2), pp. 65-83.

3Quoted in Jamieson (p.70): See Goodman, A. (1999). Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 292.

4Quoted in Jamieson, p. 70. See http://edexcellence.net/publications/wheredidssgowrong.html .