A NATURAL RIGHTS CURRICULAR DIRECTION

[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.

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[1] Edward K. Cheng, “Torts,” Law School for Everyone – a transcript book (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2017).

[2] Daniel M. Shea, Magruder’s American Government (Boston, MA:  Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2019).

[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).

MECHANICAL OR ORGANIC; WHO CARES?

[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 this series’ account on the effects the natural rights view has had on civics education.  Prominently, among those effects civics has portrayed a more objectified view of government and politics.  Previous postings reveal that political science, under the influence of the political systems construct, imposes a mechanical or an organic view on how the political system is described and explained in the nation’s classrooms. 

Has the way political science, the discipline, defined or observed its subject matter affected how civics education treats its subject matter?  After all, political science is the main source of information for that secondary subject.  As it turns out, political science has experienced meaningful changes since 1950.

The practitioners of that discipline, in effect, shifted from one image of politics to another; the first reflects the behavioral revolt and the second, the post-behavioral revolt (both reviewed in previous postings). That discipline went through more than one basic shift during the twentieth century and one those shifts, the second, had to do with this concern of how one could analogize governance and politics.

As for calls emanating from the post-behavioral shift, to update the way one views political systems – not as machines but as organisms – one can observe that the treatment most teachers use is machines.  They do not consciously do this but in effect that is the way they tend to view their subject matter.  But for the sake of discussion, one can concede that the better way of perceiving this subject is to look at a political system as an organism. 

If teachers were to take this organic view seriously, what does that mean in their attempts to teach students about the realities of governance?  David Easton's political systems model does address such organic elements as community, regime, and authority as integral parts of the political system.  But these elements are presented in a typical civics classroom by way of explaining how a system provides expected services. 

The political system makes authoritative allocation decisions about sought-after benefits.  The context in which these allocations take place are within the social makeup of particular groups, e.g., laws concerning gun control, or of the society as a whole, e.g., national defense policies.  Those collective settings, when viewed more organically, encourage a study or merely an observation toward a more humane perspective than what one can garner from a mechanical view. 

But within this organic view, a sense emerges; that is, that the “organism” is mostly governed by external forces which are bombarding the system with a plethora of inputs.  Therefore, this “organic” view does not alter the operative assumption that, to a meaningful degree, the system has a passive character – one of agency.  As such, the system is incapable or highly limited in its ability to voluntarily initiate action.  

To be a bit more concrete:  Imagine a single cell organism floating in a fluid.  It is attracted to positive sustenance and avoids discomforting elements.  That is how the political system is viewed “organically.”  It is not viewed as having even self-motivating capabilities of a flea or an ant.  One can observe, such a view does provide one an explanation for the apparent hypocrisy of which too many politicians can be accused. 

They simply seem to seek the immediate reward or avoid the immediate punishment.  After all, politics is defined by some as the “art of the possible.”  And the possible is determined by what the accumulated political forces in the environment contain at a given time.  As Easton indicates, as one might be drawn to behaviorism in psychology, one would perceive government as issuing chosen outputs with the expectation of being rewarded by those who operate within the system and have the requisite levels of power.[1] 

This leans toward a highly deterministic view of politics in which the political system, like the organism just described, is merely responding to stimuli in its environment.  While political behaviorists were not so crude as to be purely deterministic, the influence of such views are more than just inconsequential.  They have lent themselves toward encouraging the presentation of political and governmental realities in detached and almost inhuman fashion. 

It also presents a system incapable of truly leading the populace.  It merely responds to political pressure.  At a minimum, this approach can not be judged (at least by this writer) as one that encourages a populous to seek to establish and/or maintain a federated relationship among its members – its partners – and with the government.

Secondary textbooks, assuming one buys into this organic image, capture an essential aspect of this view.  In their pages, a vision of government emerges as something out there and while it responds to the electorate, it is not part of the electorate, much as pointed out in a previous posting, a department store and its customers are two separate elements. 

For example, in terms of feedback, as those in authority hear and see how people are reacting to past policies and actions, those in government can adjust or correct perceived “mistakes.”  Does one want an example?  Consider how the various state governments are currentlyreacting to the covid 19 crisis. 

Not only does the image presented in textbooks relate to a system devoid of any leadership potential by those in government, but the picture it presents is also misleading.  They do not sufficiently take into account the factor of power among the populous.  Not all stimuli have the same effect.  That is, as described earlier in this blog, not all participants in the system are equally capable of exerting influence, i.e., not all of them have the same power.

Government is thereby a service-rendering entity for some more than others, not an extension of the people as a whole.  This is not portrayed as a reality, but the lack of equality is not alluded to as an ideal.  Textbooks present an image where all seem to be equal in this process.  This blog in short order will provide the evidence to back up that claim. 

Let this writer remind the reader that the role of textbooks cannot be overstated.  Again, most teachers depend on textbooks to basically make their curricular choices.[2] This following quote captures the effects that textbooks and other supportive materials have on what is taught not only in civics, but across the whole curriculum:

Instructional materials represent the resources that teachers use to develop student understanding of subject-specific concepts and skills in the enactment of the curriculum.  Such materials include textbooks, workbooks, laboratory manuals, manipulatives such as three-dimensional solids, laboratory supplies and equipment, videos, laser discs, CDs, software, and websites.  Developed by many different entities, instructional materials often become critical, defining components of instructional programs … In particular, commercial publishing firms with K-12 divisions dedicated to producing and selling school textbooks are central players in shaping what most teachers teach … Educational material production is “big business” … Thus, although publishers can and do produce materials in response to particular educational changes, decisions to invest in such developments are always tempered by estimates of the potential demand for materials supporting those changes.  Accordingly, curricular content specified as important by textbook adoption policies in large states has great influence on the content of commercially available texts.[3]

Research into this concern has been consistent.

While this quote mentions other sources than the textbooks, one should remember supplemental materials are part of the textbook product.  That is, the textbook companies provide to schools these supportive materials of what their textbooks describe and explain.

          To point out the obvious, these “big businesses” have an interest in assuring that the content of their books, especially those that relate to civics do not pose challenging messaging to the system in which they operate.  The natural rights view is well ensconced in how the system operates at the school site.

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

[2] Stephen J. Thornton, “Teacher as Curricular-Instructional Gatekeeper in Social Studies, in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, edited by James P. Shaver (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 237-248.  While this citation is dated, there is no reason to believe the point made is not as true today as it was in 1991.

[3] “Chapter 4, Curriculum As a Channel of Influence:  What Shapes What Is Taught to Whom,” in Investigating the Influence of Standards:  A Framework for Research in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education, edited by Iris R. Weiss, Michael S. Knapp, Karen S. Hollweg, and Gail Burrill (Washington, DC:  National Academy Press, 2002), emphasis added.  This report is a product of the National Research Council’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.