A BIT OF CONTEXT

This blog is about to begin a series of postings that will engage in an exercise that it has avoided up to this point in its history.  It is about to describe an instructional planning effort in which the tenets of federation theory are applied to a contemporary issue and demonstrate how the theory can be utilized.  To begin this effort, it is useful to review what is known about the issue that has been chosen.  And to do that, it is helpful to provide some context.  This later aim is the purpose of this posting.

          To foreshadow this overall effort, the reader should be aware that the final unit of study will portray a bias toward historical research in both its researching of the issue and in what the students will be asked to do in way of classroom inquiry.  So, to put this issue in context, this posting revisits a topic this blog has addressed before.  The following account is taken from a previous posting, “The Economic Face of It.”

In a post financial crisis book, one dedicated to explaining what caused the resulting recession [which began in 2008], William K. Tabb makes an interesting observation.  His use of the concept, social structure of accumulation (SSA), places the importance of a prevailing mental construct at the center of determining how an economy functions:

The social structure accumulation (SSA) framework suggests that periods of growth require a coherent set of mutually reinforcing institutions favorable to capable accumulation.  These involve the creation of relatively lasting accommodations between contesting social forces, including stable understandings between capital and labor, the United States and the rest of the world, capital and the state, capitalists and other capitalists, and citizens and their government.  Institutional stability provides conditions under which the behavior of others, the meaning of events, and the likely outcome of actions can be predicted over the relevant planning horizon with enough confidence to provide consistent expectations, and so encourage investment and promote growth.[1]

In short, economic actors, according to Tabb, need to be sufficiently on the same page in both thought and action.  This can be viewed as reflecting a sufficiently unified mental economic image among these actors.  Short of that, economies suffer from drift and progress is stymied.

There has been a series of SSAs throughout the history of the US.  Tabb’s analysis is focused on what he terms the neoliberal SSA.  It is based on a general acceptance of a libertarian view of government’s legitimate role as being highly limited in the economy.  Historically, it replaced the Keynesian SSA that dominated our economic views from the 1930s through World War II and into the 1960s.  That view legitimized a very strong role for government and led to such policies as Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and a whole array of regulatory agencies to oversee the economy.  As the 1970s came and went with their inflation and malaise associated with the post-Watergate years and the administration of Jimmy Carter, that SSA fell into disfavor.  Then there was the articulation of Ronald Reagan along with his presidency.  Through the thrust of his policies, we have had the neoliberal view guiding our economic activities up until the financial debacle of 2008.  That span of years saw a high degree of deregulation.  Whether the Great Recession has been enough to dislodge it, is still an open question, but I think the upsurge of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders reflects a higher sense of anger and anxiety among the American people – our collective discontent.  Those are the very emotions that lead to a change in beliefs and actions.

          With this backdrop, the issue of foreign trade and its effects on employment opportunities should be considered.  In the next posting, the year 1971 will be highlighted.  It is that year that certain disruptive conditions to the economy was beginning to be recognized.  Beginning with abandoning the gold standard, what was being understood was that the Keynesian SSA was not meeting the challenges of the changing economic conditions.  It would take another ten years for that SSA to be replaced with the Reaganomics SSA (Reagan took office in 1981).

          Stay tuned.

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[1] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012), 25.

REVIEW STATEMENT, AN UPDATE

This blog has reported that current efforts in civics education have been deficient.  This has been reflected by un-civic characteristics of the American public and are evidenced by several problematic indicators.  They include:

·        insufficient levels of government and political knowledge,

·        low levels of political engagement and low levels of political skills,

·        among those who are engaged, high indulgence in what is called extreme politics,

·        low disposition to be engaged,

·        low levels of civility,

·        and high levels of criminal behavior as compared to other nations or to other times in the nation’s history. 

While civics instruction is not the cause of these problems, this writer believes it has been an enabling force. 

In terms of these problems, the blog attributes an enabling functional role to the dominance of the natural rights construct in the choosing of civics educational content.  The natural rights view of governance and politics, which became prominent after World War II, has encouraged a very self-centered view of citizenship.  It has diminished the more communal view, traditional federalism, that was dominant up till that post war period. 

Previous postings have provided a historical account on the origins and manifestations of the natural rights perspective which dates all the way back to the time of the writing of the US Constitution.  It goes on to describe and explain how this view has grown in influence and has in more recent years affected what has been taught in the nation’s civics classrooms.  This has been in terms of both content and instructional processes.

The blog also described and explained the role traditional federalism played by describing its historical importance in the nation’s development.  In so doing, the blog points out that that construct offers those basic ideas and values that serve as a foundation for what is being proposed by this blog – a liberated federalism construct. 

Finally, the blog describes this favored and proposed construct.  It does this by presenting a federalist moral code and a review of a federalist political model.  That presentation proceeds to explain how the model is “activated” by reviewing an area of concern that accounts for most political challenges a federalist approach would address. 

That area of concern is those set of challenges that are a product of inequality as defined by a federalist designation of two forms of equality:  baseline equality and equality of treatment.  This latter form is also known as regulated condition. 

What remains is to take a practical turn in which the blog will demonstrate how the model and its accompany moral code can be used to develop a unit of study.  For the demonstration, this author chooses the issue of foreign trade and its effect on employment opportunities in the US.  This is timely as it was a determining concern in how the presidential election of 2016 turned out. 

Starting with the next posting, the blog will begin by reviewing and developing the social, theoretical view of the issue area in question.  This will incorporate those aspects of federation theory related to the issue area and a more substantive reporting of what constitutes the known aspects of this issue.  For the latter concern, this blog will rely on a recently published work dedicated to this issue:  Failure to Adjust:  How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy by Edward Alden.

If this writer were to develop this unit for his own teaching effort, he would use this source, but would look at other sources as well.  Since this current effort is for demonstration purposes, this will be the sole source.  He will take the information provided by this source and match it up against the concerns that federation theory emphasizes.

After this initial analysis is complete, he will follow the rough material development process outlined by Ralph Tyler[1] which consists of identifying instructional objectives, develop learning experiences, organize learning experiences, evaluate student performance and instructional objectives.  These steps will be loosely followed to explain how the plan is developed.  This will begin with the next posting.

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[1] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1969/1949).