FROM A CHALLENGING SETTING, A CHALLENGE

In a recent article that gives an overall account of how effective our current efforts in civics education are, Kathleen Hall Jamieson forms a set of conclusions. These conclusions are:

1) neither the federal government nor the states have made high-quality civics education a priority; 2) social studies textbooks may not adequately convey the knowledge or facilitate the development of the skills required of an informed, engaged citizenry; 3) consequential differences in access and outcomes between upper- and lower-class students persist; 4) cutbacks in funding for schools make implementation of changes in any area of the curriculum difficult; and 5) the polarized political climate increases the likelihood that curricular changes will be cast as advancing a partisan agenda.[1]

I have in this blog discussed many of these states of affairs, but one I have not addressed is number 5, the effect our current polarization has had and which directly draws attention to the challenges of changing our curricular offerings.

Let us say you are a parent, a teacher, a school official, or a national leader who is convinced that our civics offerings have to change.  There are, of course, many political obstacles facing you.  The most obvious obstacle is that those whose power is dependent on the status quo and, therefore, will view any meaningful change as threatening, will likely be against you.  But let us further say that a proposed change becomes popular – oh, perhaps federalist ideals become the “in-thing” – and it is politically advantageous to adopt and attempt to implement the sort of curricular changes that are promoted in this blog.  Does that guarantee a successful change?  No, it does not.

Why not?  The main problem is that what is being proposed includes not only changing textbooks – which, by the way, I don’t suggest doing – but also changing how people basically do their jobs at the school site.  What is being promoted in this blog, can be implemented to varying levels of change.  It could simply mean that teachers consider different concerns when they prepare their lessons.  For the teacher who simply follows the textbook, this level could be challenging.  As I have explained in earlier postings, the prevalent textbooks in the field are based on a natural rights perspective in the content and format they employ.  For the teachers who follow the content, page after page, of the assigned textbook, all of a sudden they are being asked to impose a different perspective on that content.  Whether those professionals are prepared for such a task is more a catch as catch can type of situation.  Some are sophisticated enough; some are not.  Therefore, in-service training, an expensive and time consuming proposition, would have to be part of the change effort.  But further, I would consider that what is being proposed is transformational in nature; that is, it calls on teachers to change not only their objective view of the subject matter, but more likely, a normative shift as well.  This could be assisted by, to the degree it exists, the popular call for such a change.  But popular whims come and go.  Early in my career, I experienced the popular concern over the Soviet threat as spurred on by their launch of Sputnik.  By the time I was teaching, just a few years into that period, the fear of Sputnik had been effectively quieted and with that, all calls for changes in education ceased to be heard.

A heightened level of implementation would call for a school to change how it was run.  A federalist approach to schooling would count on a shared and collaborative approach to organizing, planning, and teaching among teachers, teachers and administrators, and among administrators.  To just comment on one of these collaborative settings, that of teachers, let me report that from my experience, teachers are very much cloistered when it comes to their view of their classroom, not their school.  The classroom is viewed, by most teachers, as their domain.  As such, they are highly sensitive to the, in their eyes, illegitimate meddling by other teachers or abrasive administrators.  I write “abrasive” not due to any personality traits, but by the very nature of what these other people attempt to do.  Therefore, what is needed in order to effectuate the type of change being sought is a change of heart – not just of what is believed to be true, but what is believed and felt should be true.

Now let’s get real.  As Jamieson points out, we are in very divisive times.  I believe that one reason for this condition is our overall view of government and politics, that of the natural rights construct.  This has been explained previously in this blog.  Our current presidential race demonstrates sufficient evidence of this partisan divide which has also characterized our inability to meet many of our national, political needs and demands.  Negotiations and compromise have almost become impossible to achieve even when it is mutually advantageous for all sides to agree.  To agree would hand success to the opposite side and, if one is of the opposition party, would help improve conditions which reflects well on the party in power.  Again, a change that might threaten such partisan environment will not be welcomed and will be judged suspiciously.  It will be evaluated by the standards set by any supportive ideology either side might hold.  Federalist thought will probably be interpreted by the left as a belief system supporting parochial, bigoted life views which it is not.  The right would see it as a challenge to individual prerogatives and heightened governmental intrusions which is true to a limited degree.  As proposed in this blog, the liberated federalism construct – the proposed construct – has been presented as a synthesis between natural rights and critical theory.  As such, there are aspects of this proposed construct that are seen positively by either side of the political divide, but more important in a partisan environment, are seen as antithetical to cherished beliefs.  Consequently, under our current conditions, any attempt to shift our curricular content toward a federated view will be a long one in which careful and prescient planning needs to be done if it is to be successful.

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[1] Jamieson, K. H.  (2013).  The challenges facing civic education.  Daedalus:  Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Spring, 142 (2), pp. 74-75.

INITIAL POWER FACTORS

In the literature of politics, probably the most often cited definition of power is provided by Robert Dahl.[1]  That definition takes the following form:  power is a condition in which one party, person or collective, convinces some other party or parties to do something they would not do otherwise.  This is the definition I have used in this blog.  I have also cited Harold Lasswell’s context for power:  who gets what, when, how, and when.[2]  I have added, with little humor, “and how much.”  Of course, since political science is a social science, one should not confuse this use of the term with how an electrician or a physicist uses it.  They, it turns out, can measure this physical entity; political scientists cannot measure its social counterpart.  Is this important in our attempts to understand politics?  I would say it is.

Power has been considered more or less the central concept in political science.  It’s akin to what the concept, energy, is in physics.  Again, they can measure accurately and precisely their main variable.  Insofar as we cannot in political science or in the study of civics, we are highly limited in our predictive “powers.”  And after all, is it not the main reason for having a science in the first place to be able to predict and, in turn, control?  Perhaps it’s just as well we can’t measure this essential quality of politics.  If it were possible, those who could would have an untold advantage over the rest of us.  Please don’t think that there have not been attempts to measure it; there have, but to no avail.

In this posting, I want to consider some of the conceptual thinking that has gone into this aspect of politics and reported by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.[3]  Starting with the basic structure of Dahl’s definition, he basically explains that the definition is wanting.  It glosses over certain components of a power relation that, it turns out, are essential to delve into in order to understand power’s scope and domain in a given relationship between parties.  By the scope, Nye is referring to the who – the who, who is administering the power (the powerful) and the who, who is the subject of the power exercise.  By the domain, he is pointing to the substantive issues or social/physical conditions over which the exercise of power is performed or attempted.  So, in the obvious case of a government instituting a policy on desegregation in schools, the who is those citizens and school officials who will change their practices in order to comply with the new policy and the domain is the educational practices involved.  But when we look more closely at the scope and domain we find factors, if you will, that are very telling about the situation which not only reveal important social dynamics, but get at what is exactly powerful about what is happening.

Running through this view is the notion that someone with power is able to get what he/she wants by getting others to do things.  But the power lies in the fact that to some degree, the other person(s) are not disposed to do that something.  Here lies the murkiness that prohibits clear measuring.  Simply stated, we don’t know, in a given situation, how disposed a person is.  But that aside, there are other shortcomings.  When a party is getting others to do something, this is done through mechanisms.  The supposed power holder(s) need resources so as to be able to “convince” the subject to be a subject.  In an attempt to simplify this, let me point to three types of motivators that solicit a subject’s compliance.  They are to avoid punishment, to seek reward, or to satisfy an attraction – let’s call these coercive power, reward power, and attraction power.[4]  And in this, we can designate two overall categories of power:  hard power – mostly referring to coercive power which depends on either authority or destructive capacity such as with military resources – and soft power – mostly referring to capacities to change the subject’s mind so that he/she/they want to do the powerful person’s bidding either through rewards or through a sense of righteousness, knowledge, personal, or some other appeal.  In all of this, the subject need not know who is exerting power in order for power to be administered – many times the powerful would rather remain anonymous.  This might assist future exertions of power.  Of course, there can be combinations of these approaches.  The point is, though, that any definition of power should at least allude to these factors; they are that central to the meaning of the term in how it is used in political/civic analysis.

This leads to seeing or defining power from two perspectives.  We can define it in terms of resources or we can define it in terms of behavioral outcomes (what the subject is either expected to do or actually does).  In each perspective, there is a necessary process.  Either resources (e. g., military assets) have to convert into a viable strategy before desired behavioral outcomes are accomplished or the means are chosen by which desired wishes are skillfully accomplished through actions initiated by the powerful.  Actually, in either case we are saying the same thing:  a goal or aim is sought by implementing a course of action that successfully converts desired outcomes into behavioral outcomes.  And this leads to an array of variables (factors) that have to be accounted for in the development of that/those strategies.

That is a topic for another day.  But let’s make a stab at a definition:  power is a social relation in which one party or parties get another party or parties to do something due to some strategy which sufficiently eliminates or diminishes any reluctance by the use of coercive, reward, and/or attraction resources.  While these factors still elude exact measurement, it might lead to better estimations.

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[1] Dahl, R.  (1961).  Who governs:  Democracy and power in an American city.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Lasswell, H. and Kaplan, A.  (1950).  Power and society:  A framework for political inquiry.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[3] Nye, J. S. Jr.  (2011).  The future of power.  New York, NY:  PublicAffairs.

[4] These types are derived from French, J. R. P., Jr. and Raven, B.  (1967).  The bases of power.  In E. P. Hollander and R. G. Hunt (Eds.) Current perspectives in social psychology (pp. 504-512).  New York, NY:  Oxford University Press.  These writers identify five types:  coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert.