[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.]
What does the natural rights’ view of governance and politics see as
being the appropriate content for civics?
Included in this question 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 – this blog from time
to time has addressed these concerns.
This posting begins addressing these curricular issues as a set of
concerns even more directly.
Most
civics’ textbook writers have adopted a natural rights view. By doing so, they have promoted either
intentionally or unintentionally certain normative messages. But to see what constitutes the content of
civics, just pick up copies of the textbooks prominently used. For a list of these books, see the posting,
“A Natural Rights Curricular Direction,” April 24, 2020.
As it has been described previously,
there is not much that distinguishes these textbooks. They all take a mostly
structural approach to describe government.
Consequently, there is little explanation of the political aims of
people or the concerns of communities that are conveyed by these classroom materials.
As described, the
systems/structural-functional approach these books use says little of the
interdependence of citizens on each other.
But despite this fairly “clinical” view of government and politics, the
books still convey a central moral message: that of classical liberalism or
what this blog refers to as the natural rights perspective.
To be clear, the conveyance of a moral
message would be the case with the adoption of any construct. Moral implications are unavoidable. But the ascribed liberal position is ironically
to avoid values or ideological advocacy that undermine the right of individuals
to determine their own value commitments – which in turn is a value
position.
As this blog has pointed out before, 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. That construct has students relate to society
from a very self-centered point of reference or as stated earlier in this blog,
they will see civic issues from a “what's in it for me?” angle. It’s just the natural way for them to see
things.
The only positive role that government
would have under such a perspective is to provide demanded services and this
perspective encourages the citizen to take on the role of a consumer. Government, as described by the natural
rights' view, is pictured as this large overarching institution that exists to
render services.
Under this view, the citizens are the
consumers. As such, the natural rights
view, a view that promotes natural liberty, is in counter position to federal
theory that promotes federal liberty.
The first detaches a sense of duty and obligation from liberty unless
the individual chooses to attach them.
Federal liberty presupposes that duties and obligations are part and
parcel of what is expected from a citizenry.
Given that this construct, the natural
rights view, is the central theoretical foundation for what is taught in
American civics and government classes, it has a profound impact on what young
people are exposed to in terms of governmental and political content and
values. This influence is felt in a
variety of ways.
Influences range from the content found
in most textbooks, as just reported, to national attempts at assessing how well
schools perform in this subject area.
The federal government has a hand in this latter effort. As stated in a previous posting, it funds the
Center for Civic Education and, through the Center, the Educational Testing
Service. Jointly, they produce the Nation's Report Card, which includes
results emanating from testing in civics.
Testing results are not used to assess
student progress, as those tests are administered to a random sample of
students, but to assess how well schools in general are doing in instructing
students in various subject areas. An upcoming
posting will look at this testing to see how individualistically oriented it is
or how much it reflects natural rights’ thinking.
The federal effort to date, like the
prominent textbooks, has shied away from explicit individualistic language. The individualist language is derived from the
fact that it avoids moral questioning or references to duties and
obligations. The writers of the test
instruments, both in terms of the test items or the standards that are devised
to generate the test items, stick to the structural attributes of governance
and politics and avoid delving into what those elements should be.
A look at the process the Center uses
to produce the test can be helpful. To
test students, the Center for Civic Education, before producing the test items,
develops the standards upon which the questions are based. This process has generated a book containing
those standards. The reader is
encouraged to obtain a copy of the National
Standards for Civics and Government or go online and look up the national
standards; the most recent edition that a search online reveals was published
in 2014.
That publication, probably more than
any other, reflects the ongoing position of the US Department of Education
regarding curricular content for civics.[1] Until a few years ago, this writer had been
looking at these efforts for some time.
Full disclosure, this writer served on a team charged with writing test
items during the early 2000s.
Starting with the next posting, this
blog will review the content of those standards. But before turning this blog over to that
effort, one more point for this posting.
It strikes this writer that when one looks at the officialdom of social
studies at the national level, one can sense that a change of direction might
be in the works – hopefully, the C3 Framework (see citation #1) indicates a
more normative direction. Time will
tell.
[1] Of recent vintage, the federal government’s Department
of Education efforts has included a joint project with the professional
organization of social studies educators, the National Council for the Social
Studies. That project has issued a set
of national standards for civics. To see
the product of that effort see National Council for the Social Studies, Preparing
Students for College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) (Washington, D. C.: NCSS, 2013), accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.socialstudies.org/c3 . To see this writer’s critique of that effort,
see Robert Gutierrez, Toward a
Federated Nation: Implementing National
Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:
Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020) particularly Chapter 1, “C3 Framework of
Standards.’’
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