[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 posting continues to answer the question: what are the current elements of the nation’s
civics curriculum? The point has been
made that the cultural bias toward the natural rights view has affected the
general view Americans have of governance and politics and, in turn, that has
mostly defined the nation’s civics curriculum.
That bias has seeped into forming a loosely held commitment to a value
orientation, one that holds as its main concern the protection of the citizens’
rights.
And how they tend to define rights
follows a simple principle: each has the
right to live one’s life as he/she chooses with the only proviso that he/she
not interfere with the rights of others to do likewise. Perhaps the reader intuitively, without
reflection, agrees that that can serve as an ultimate value. A review of tort law – that law that is concerned
with harm due to negligence – seems to support this perception. A principle of that law is “no duty to a
stranger;” one can literally allow a flailing baby in a puddle to drown without
facing any legal repercussions.[1]
Beyond asking about what civics
curriculum is, this blog will begin to ask:
what should that curriculum be? And,
how one can approach that question from the perspective of curricular content? Included in these questions is the concern
over what the civic role of schools should be.
Since it is impossible to totally segregate these topics – moral
outlook, perspective of politics and governance, and elements of a civics
curriculum –the depiction of civics content goes directly to how civics
instruction meets its central charge to promote good citizenship.
Most non-academic writers in the field
of civics education, such as civics textbook writers, have adopted a natural
rights view and what this blog is about to present is meant to provide evidence
of that claim. That evidence illustrates
that these writers have promoted, either intentionally or unintentionally,
certain normative messages that reflect this bias toward individual rights identified
above.
And to an advocate of federation theory,
those textbooks promote a less than optimal message. They ignore those elements of governance that
either rely on communal obligations or provide communal opportunities. Instead, such curricular material misses
those opportunities that inform students or guide them in learning about or
experiencing the ways in which citizens engage in partnering efforts, ones that
exemplify a federated citizenry.
It is not that these elements are
totally avoided, but they are presented as background or incidental information
that are neither asked about nor highlighted as being beneficial attributes of
a federated arrangement – for which the US Constitution, in its
structural arrangements, encourages.
That constitution was written by a generation guided by federalist
principles.
As repeatedly stated in this blog, a
natural rights-based approach does not perceive governance in these terms – it
sees it as a transactional arrangement:
services for taxes. Since the
writing and ratification of that basic law, the nation drifted away from that
federalist posture to one that holds the natural rights view as dominant.
But
to see what constitutes the content of the nation’s civics classrooms, one just
needs to pick up copies of the textbooks prominently used. At the high school level that would be either
Magruder’s American Government[2]
or Glencoe United States Government:
Democracy in Action.[3] At the middle school level there are three
popular texts: Civics Today: Citizenship,
Economics, and You,[4]
Holt American Civics,[5] and
Civics: Government and Economics in Action.[6]
There is nothing much that
distinguishes the five from each other. Those
in high school use a bit more sophisticated language and examples that are more
fully developed, but essentially all five provide the same sort of
information. They all take a structural
approach to describe government.
There is little explanation in those
books about the political aims of people beyond the immediate demands or the immediate
concerns of various localities or groups of citizens. Yes, they might address some contentious
issues like water pollution, but one does not get a normative sense at what is
at stake in such issues. And what one also
does not get is how such an issue reflects the imbalance of power among the
various affected parties. As stated
earlier in this blog, one gets the misleading notion that in terms of influence
everyone is equal.
As this blog has described the
systems/structural-functional approach in previous postings, these textbooks
are written in a language that does not have much in terms of the prudence
citizens exhibit by promoting and enhancing an interdependence among themselves. But despite this fairly “clinical” view of
government and politics, the books still convey a central moral message: that
of natural liberty.
Previous postings point out that the
natural rights view descends from the political theorizing of Niccole
Machiavelli. He saw politics as amoral –
does current civics curriculum treat politics similarly? To be clear, the conveyance of a moral
message, either by commission or omission, would be inherent in the adoption of
any construct and that includes the natural rights construct. Moral implications are unavoidable.
But because of the adoption of the
classical liberal position – the natural rights view – avoids any commitment to
a set of values other than natural liberty, that is still a value commitment. In other words, this whole situation
represents a serious irony.
This attempt to avoid values is a
fool's errand. Any value position,
however limited, will entail many preferences in a variety of situations and
conditions. The natural rights
perspective is not immune to this general observation. By augmenting liberty as an ultimate value,
this approach to civics guides it to promote market values. And with that, this guidance is not as benign
as one would initially think.
At minimum, such a bias would tip the
scale toward market solutions toward a vast array of issues. A priori, that might not be bad in all
cases, but as a general dispositional point of view, guided instruction would
tend to eliminate many options especially if any them calls for energetic
governmental responses to certain conditions.
Therefore, this bias is not as politically neutral as it claims to be.
This basic posture – the prioritizing natural
liberty above all other values – has many concrete consequences. They range from ignoring serious challenges
to the political society of the US to resulting in an instructional approach
devoid of the very humanness politics entails.
The next posting picks up this concern.
[1] Edward K. Cheng, “Torts,” Law School for Everyone – a
transcript book (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2017).
[3] Glencoe United States Government: Democracy in Action (New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010).
[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).
[5] William H. Hartley and
William S. Vincent, Holt American Civics (New
York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2003).
[6] James E. Davis, Phyllis Maxey Fernlund, and Peter
Woll, Civics: Government and
Economics in Action (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2018).
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