LACKING IN TERMS OF METHODS

[Note:  If the reader has taken up reading this blog with this posting, he/she is helped by knowing that this posting is the next one in a series of postings.  The series begins with the posting, “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-natural-rights-view-of-morality.html).  Overall, the series addresses how the study of political science has affected the civics curriculum of the nation’s secondary schools.]

This blog of late has been reviewing an approach to political science that has had a profound effect on civics education.  By stating an effect, that does not mean it has determined what that education is.  But it does mean influencing what that curriculum has chosen to highlight in terms of content or scope.  In addition, that influence has not been extended to the instructional approaches classroom teachers have implemented despite an attempt to do so by the federal government in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

During that time, federal officials encouraged teachers to apply something called the New Social Studies – a mostly instructional reform effort that heavily relied on scientific methodologies that teachers were to adopt.  That effort was initiated as a response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik.  Science illiteracy among Americans was considered a national detriment in the ensuing competition with the Soviets in terms of space exploration with its defense implications in mind.  This a multidimensional story the reader can readily look up.  Here, only a mention will do.

While the effort to instill a more “scientific” approach to civics and to all social studies led to the publication of various textbooks, the overall effect was minimal.  The instructional approach this movement called for, the inquiry approach, was/is at odds with the dominant approaches most teachers employ.  Those would be didactic approaches such as lecturing.  Basically, didactic instruction imparts information; inquiry calls on students to discover information. 

At a minimum, those civics educators who have been so influenced by behavioral political studies have incorporated a general view of systems theory in terms of the content or scope of the subject matter but not its processes.  In terms of the scope, though, it has encouraged those civics educators to neglect the realm of community as an instructional topic and with it, all the obligations such an area of concern entails.

Over the last few decades or so, the trend toward individualism – as encouraged by the dominant natural rights view and further legitimized by behavioral studies – became so apparent that many school districts began to institute community service requirements for graduation.  This was relatively new when this writer left his last classroom assignment in the year 2000. 

At that time, his observation regarding this requirement was that the resulting process to supervise any community service was vacuous.  That is, the process was, in his school district, ill-supervised and students did not treat it seriously.  It demonstrated how un-communal the schools and the school system administrators had become. 

Perhaps things are different now, but he could find out by working at a school – an option not available to him.  But this judgement that the requirement was merely a formality was further supported recently by the testimony from a social studies teacher in a mid-size school district. 

During February 2020, this writer asked a teacher, a social studies department chairperson, about whether his district maintained any community service requirement.  According to the department chair the community service element is not a general requirement in the Leon County schools of Florida.  There is a requirement attached to an honors program, but again, other than asking standard questions, the supervision of the requirement is limited.

 So, to the degree this amoral view of politics which attachable to a natural rights view has captured the minds and hearts of Americans in general, and civics educators in particular, one can see how national politics has drifted.  Under the banner of a simplistic natural liberty, the dysfunctional state the nation’s politics finds itself as a bifurcated political environment and it has come about by people “doing their own thing.”  That state of affairs deserves its own investigation – the topic for future postings.

Up to this point, this blog might have left the reader with the impression that civics instruction around the country regularly portrays an image of citizens trying to outdo each other for favorable governmental policy decisions.  After all the overall description of politics is that it is an activity by which people or groups seek public resources through a competitive process.  But that characterization, as presented in civics classrooms, does not extend usually to average Americans and this blog doesn't state that it does. 

If only civics and government classes were that interesting.  What this blog tries to convey is that civics and government classes have taken on a descriptive role, and they limit their efforts to describing the structure of the American political system.  Stated another way, secondary schools portray the government and the other parts of the political system as one big machine.

In the political system there are these “branches” of government, bureaucratic departments and offices, and outside government there are people (voters, interest groups, and political parties) who seek government action.  Usually, each of these provide the subject matter for each of a civics course’s units of study.  The image, as portrayed by civics education as currently taught, is of a political system resembling a big machine with multiple interacting parts. 

The organism view that Easton wrote about[1] – and as described in a previous posting – has not made it to secondary civics instruction in American schools – at least not to any meaningful degree.  Most notably, that instruction has little to nothing to say about the feedback process which makes what Easton describes a system as being more organic than mechanical.  All the juicier stuff of intrigue, power plays, deception, and the like is left to novels or the more partisan pundits on TV.

In contrast, school renditions of government are pale, objectified, and lacking in human drama.  After all, in keeping with classical liberal values, there is no aim to induce any moral position, outrage, or normative stand except for its support of natural liberty.  Topics such as equality are avoided, community or communal obligations are neglected, business needs are absent, or concern for the impoverished is nonexistent.  What remains in those courses is bland, bland, bland.

Along with a lack of any drama, the nation’s classrooms, for the most part, neglect the research methodologies associated with the behavioral movement or that of any other political science approach.  But what of the instructional methodologies?  Are they important?  That is, is it important whether a teacher uses didactic methods or interactive/inquiry methods?

They round out what this adopted construct – the natural rights construct – is about; methodologies are not just ways to look at reality, they are ways to ignore reality or, as a former vice-president might say, fail to detect “inconvenient truths.”  This blog’s only editorial position regarding process is that whatever process a teacher adopts, it needs to have students reflect – not just memorize – on the needs of the political system and its citizens to be of any import or any effectiveness.

---

[1] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).