TOWARD OBJECTIFICATION

The last few postings attempted to convey the theoretical concerns of political science during the years after World War II (1950s and 1960s).  This period is important to appreciate when one is concerned with the current state of civics education.  Educators of that time adopted a more scientific orientation to their subject disciplines.  Included were the social studies, and the story that led to this development is worth considering.

The sum effect of this theoretical work – the political systems model and the structural-functional model – on civics education – particularly on the content of civics curriculum – is to emphasize teaching the structure and processes of input agents such as interest groups and the structure and processes of government. 

What is minimized is a more value-oriented content.  This is significantly different from what prevailed as late as the mid-1960s when at the high school level, courses entitled Problems of Democracy were common.  In short, civics became more mechanical and avoided dealing with social issues that could be controversial. 

Today, if teachers want to introduce controversial issues, they need to either develop such materials or obtain available materials that are designed to have students analyze such issues and develop defensible positions regarding such concerns.[1]  More on this below.

As for the story that led to the current prevailing view of civics, there are three relevant developments.  One, the one that this blog has already commented on extensively, is the growing cultural shift from a federalist view to a natural rights view in the prevailing beliefs and attitudes concerning government and politics.  But there are two other developments that have had meaningful effects.

The second development was the prominent position that behavioral psychology enjoyed in the study of politics during the mid-century years of the last century.  The work of various behaviorists, most prominent being B. F. Skinner, had an influence on the various social sciences.  The exact nature of this influence was a subject David Easton wrote about:

The original behavioristic paradigm, S-R (stimulus-response), has yielded to the more intelligible one of S-O-R (stimulus – organism – response) in which feelings, motivations, and all the other aspects of the subjective awareness and reaction of the organism are taken into account as potentially useful data.  This has, of course, spelled the doom of pristine behaviorism …[2]

This quote hints at the influence of behaviorism.  That is, it assumes people basically try to seek rewards and avoid punishments.  The variance lies in how a current situation is viewed and how rewards and punishments are defined at a given time.  By studying behaviors, how people react in what they do in varying situations, one can describe, with certain levels of certainty, how people will behave in similar situations in the future.  This view led to the input-output-feedback structure of the political systems model. 

          Critics of this view argued that the whole systems approach made the study of politics mechanical.  To counter, Easton argued that with the introduction of an “organism” element, the systems view was more akin to studying politics as the activity of an organism with self-adjusting abilities.  One issue debated was how deterministic this view attempted to cast political behavior.  Briefly stated, the question was:  how much was human political behavior no more than a calculation of rewards and punishments in a particular environment?

          And by observing and measuring behavior, political studies took on a more scientific posture.  The turn provided an anecdote to what was perceived as being more traditional approaches to that study that relied on historical methods of research. 

Many saw those earlier methods as elaborate self-indulgent exercises in which personal political biases were expressed.  Lacking any effort to objectify their analysis using qualitative methods, political scientists were not scientists; they were, at best, expert editorial writers.  On the other hand, a shift toward a behavioral approach promised to be scientific as it relied on quantitative research instead.

          There was created a nexus between those who favored quantified research, such as corporate approaches to studying business practices, and natural rights advocates who favored self-defining consumer demands.  There is an ironic association in which those who see value in a deterministic accounting for human behavior and, at the same time, hold a view of individuals being free agents to determine their life goals and how to pursue those goals.

These reflect assumptions about the nature of human beings that barely rise to conscious consideration.  Yet this inconsistency seems not to deter those who defend both behaviorism and believe that liberty should be a person’s political trump value.  

By doing so, those educators who agree with both positions develop and implement a natural rights-based civics curriculum which practices instruction that is devoid of normative concerns and highly reliant on imparting information concerning the structure and functions of government.

But there was a singular historical event that sealed the establishment of a natural rights approach.  This third development was the launching of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite.  Suddenly, in 1957, the US’s major adversary demonstrated that it had the scientific understanding, technical knowledge, and wherewithal to deliver a nuclear weapon via a rocket.  That posed a true threat to America.  The US could not match that ability and, therefore, had to immediately do something about it.

One of the things the government did was to invest a great deal of money in the nation’s schools to upgrade math and science instruction.  This would close the gap between the US and the Soviet Union regarding the science and math knowledge requirements to catch the Soviets.[3]

In the process, the government provided moneys to other disciplines and that included social studies.  Suddenly, there appeared new curricula with names such as new math, new biology, new physics, and the like.  Included was the new social studies.

The new social studies was to be more scientific in its instructional choices.  The general thought was to align school subjects with science and scientific thinking by imbuing the nation’s overall curriculum with scientifically inspired innovations.

Educators introduced students to methodologies – referred to as the scientific method.  This newer approach was applied to social studies and was called the inquiry approach.  And this took place at the same time the above-mentioned application of systems’ behavioral view was being applied to human study.  Even the study of history was affected.[4]

Citing progressive rationales, social studies teachers were to implement open-ended lessons, thereby generating student involvement into investigating inquiry questions and avoiding dull lecturing; an aim, by the way, that was not successfully accomplished.  Most social studies teachers kept on lecturing. 

While there were teachers who attempted the newer instructional methods, they were the exceptions.  One should never expect that teachers will readily accept what educational innovators concoct on their university campuses or in their publishing offices.  The new social studies movement lasted about ten to fifteen years and all that remains, in terms of civics education, are textbooks that do not apply inquiry methods, but do reflect the bias to present structural and functional information.

But what about values education?  One can readily see the relevance of values if the subject matter is citizenship.  The natural rights bias is to promote individuals determining what their own values will be – it treats this concern as an element of liberty.  On the other hand, the bias toward objectifying political studies encouraged that a distance should be established between the study of government and politics and the treatment of values.[5] 

The effect was to avoid or diminish any treatment of value issues in the classroom.[6]  There were exceptions to this general trend.  Sensing a demand for addressing values in relation to social studies, there were various projects that attempted to fill the gap that the natural rights turn created.  Two notable examples were the Jurisprudential approach[7] and the values clarification approach.[8] 

Both efforts had students review either a controversial issue or a personal character issue and pass judgement as to what should be done in a value challenged situation or how students should identify a personal preference.  Those choices were to reflect students’ values and, in turn, provide the opportunity and obligation to publicly – within the classroom – defend the values identified.  The instructor’s role was not to pass judgement as to the worthiness of students’ preferences, but to instruct them on how to logically defend their positions.

Stated another way, as part of the nation’s shift toward a natural rights perspective, one resulting change was relinquishing the traditional dependence on Protestant theology to define what moral lessons schools imparted to students.[9]  Collectively, these two efforts were to present either opportunities for students to make life-defining value statements or to solve controversial issues which presented value dilemmas in the classroom. 

These efforts are continued even today by others, mostly education professors as part of their training of aspiring teachers.  In most classrooms around the nation, the only values that are actively promoted are organizational values that are essential in running a school.  Such values are, for example, punctuality – get to class on time – and honesty – don’t cheat on tests.  But in terms of political values, students are mostly left to their own devices.

---

[1] For example, an organization that offers civics rationale and classroom materials concerning controversial issues is ProCon.com.  See http://www.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005860 (accessed April 5, 2017).  Some of the argument promoting such value oriented material ties the concern to instruction that has students engage in critical thinking.  Critical thinking has gained prominence in the various state standards around the country.

[2] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31, 12.

[3] Jeffrey Byford and William Russell, “The New Social Studies:  A Historical Examination of Curriculum Reform,” Social Studies Research and Practice, 2 (1), accessed April 7, 2017, http://www.socstrpr.org/files/Vol%202/Issue%201%20-%20Spring%202007/Research/2.1.3.pdf .

[4] Edwin Fenton, The New Social Studies, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).

[5] Reference to values, according to this view, should be limited to treating them as variables in the study of human behavior, variables no more important than other variables such as income level or ethnic background.  For example, why do citizens vote the way they do?  A tested variable in a relevant inquiry could look at stated values as a predictor of voting behavior.

[6] James D. Hunter, The Death of Character:  Moral Education in an Age without Good and Evil (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2000.

[7] Donald W. Oliver and James P. Shaver, Teaching Public Issues in the High School (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) AND Fred M. Newmann, and Donald W. Oliver, Clarifying Public Controversy:  An Approach to Teaching Social Studies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970).

[8] Louis E. Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney B. Simon, Values and Teaching (Columbus, OH:  Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co, 1966).

[9] Toni M. Massaro, Constitutional Literacy (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press 1993) AND James D. Hunter, The Death of Character:  Moral Education in an Age without Good and Evil.