As any reader of this blog knows, it is dedicated to civics
education. In this posting, the writer
wants to ask a very fundamental question concerning this core school
subject. But before he does, a few facts
concerning civics should be established.
Civics is part of the broader field
of social studies. The most prominent
subject in this field is history, especially American history. A typical student in a K-12 curriculum will
have two courses in American history, one course in world history, and probably
a course in the history of the state in which he/she resides.
This very fact
tells one a lot about why social studies is part of the curriculum. Those who oversee such matters and, by
extension, the populous they represent, believe that students should get a good
sense of who they are as a people, a collective, and that is deemed to be
better accomplished by reviewing the history that has created the conditions
they are experiencing today.
Furthermore,
the study of history provides an explanation of why the political arrangements
where they live exist. The courses in American
history emphasize the political and governmental elements of the nation. A good deal of focus is placed on the
founding of the nation: the writing of
the Declaration of Independence, the
Revolutionary War, and the writing and ratification of the US Constitution.
It is with
this backdrop that one should consider the courses of study entitled civics and
American government. In effect, civics
is a watered-down version of American government and is taught in middle
school. The course extends for the whole
academic year – two semesters. It is
offered either the year before or after the middle school version of American
history. The course further emphasizes
the founding of the national political arrangement, its federal system of
government, with most attention on the central government in Washington.
American
government is offered in high school usually during the senior year. This is, of course, a bit more involved than
the middle school civics course, but, at least in the state of Florida, is only
a semester course (sharing the bill, sort of speaking, with economics, which is
the course that is offered during the other semester of the senior year). If the reader was educated in the nation’s
public school system, he/she will probably remember these courses.
That’s the
backdrop for civics and American government.
In this blog, the writer has made the argument that the purpose of
social studies, including all the history and civics taught, is to promote good
citizenship. The educational historian,
R. Freeman Butts, writes of this goal:
… preparing the people for the common
duties of republican citizenship required a common education whose first and
basic priority is building and maintaining a cohesive political community
devoted to the civic ideals of liberty, equality, popular consent, and personal
obligation for the public good.”[1]
But as they say in the vernacular, “that’s a mouthful.”
And it leads
to what this posting is about: Should
civics education be about imparting values and attitudes that support
“republican citizenship,” cohesion, and civic ideals such as liberty and
equality? The question becomes even more
strident when one considers that public schools are an arm of the government
or, stated another way: should the government be about telling us what values
and attitudes the nation’s children should have?
And if one
goes along with the commitment to impart values and attitudes, the question
becomes: which values and
attitudes? To date, this blog has
outlined three sets of values and attitudes which different political thinkers
and social education scholars have advanced.
There is one set of ideas or view that is in force today: that is, overwhelmingly,
a mental construct is guiding most of the instructional efforts in civics
across the land. That construct has been
called the natural rights construct.
The natural rights construct is an approach that leaves
much of what one should believe to the individual student. The belief it does promote is that the most
important value concerning governance and politics is the value of
liberty. It functions as the trump value
in terms of political/governmental affairs. As for
natural rights advocates, given their support of liberty, they follow the
traditional tenets of liberal political thought.
Centrally, liberal thought believes that individuals should be
free to form their own values and goals in life along with the freedom to act
toward fulfilling those values and goals. Following John Locke's standard, the
right to pursue one's value choices are limited only by the rights of others to
do likewise. This is a legitimate expression of liberty. As a trump value, the
sanctity of a person to be such a free agent has been identified by the term, individual sovereignty.[2]
To get a good sense of how this construct guides civics education,
the reader can look at the predominant American government textbook, Magruder’s American Government,[3] or
can look at one of the popular middle school texts, Glencoe Civics Today:
Citizenship, Economics, and You.[4] In reading either of these texts or others,
what one finds is a high reliance on structural treatment of government.
That is, the bulk of the content is a
series of descriptions of the various departments, agencies, programs, and the
like that make up the government’s structure or the structure of non-government
entities that deal with government, such as interest groups. This content, void of values or attitudes as
those identified by Butts, seems to come as close as one can to the position
that civics education should not be in the business of promoting political
values.
Is it totally void of such
concerns? No, but one can ask: can it be?
It has been the position of this writer that no matter which approach a
civics education program chooses, it will promote values, even if the value is
that individuals should have the freedom – liberty – to choose what further
values he/she should develop or adopt.
But short of that basic position, the natural rights construct provides
the greatest amount of freedom regarding what values a citizen should have in
terms of government or politics.
In upcoming postings, this writer will
pursue this inquiry as to whether a civics program should teach beyond
instructing students what the structure of government is and proceed to
encourage or impart a set of governmental/political values and attitudes of
more substance. He will do this by
reviewing the other two constructs: critical
theory and federation theory.
[1]R. Freeman Butts, The
Civic Mission in Educational Reform: Perspectives for the Public and the
Profession (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1989), 65.
[2] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its
Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarianism
Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanhan, MD:
Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-37.
[3] Willian A. McClenaghan,
Magruder’s American Government (Florida Teacher’s Edition) (Boston,
MA: Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2013).
[4] Richard C. Remy, John J. Patrick, David C. Saffell, and Gary
E. Clayton. Glencoe Civics Today:
Citizenship, Economics, and You.
New York, NY: McGraw Hill
Glencoe, 2008.
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