SELF-CENTERED CURRICULUM

 

As of the last series of postings, perhaps the reader has noticed that in the 1990s, especially the last years of that decade, a slew of writers lamented the heightened degree of individualism and diminished community that America experienced since the onslaught of the 1980s.  That earlier decade was noted for the promulgation of neoliberal economic policy better known as Reaganomics.  Sum total, self-centeredness became enshrined among Americans.

          And spurred on by excessive individualism, which is associated with the natural rights perspective, several writers such as Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, Michael J. Sandel, Michael Waltzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor helped start and encourage a movement called communitarianism.  Simply stated, they argue that societies need viable socializing agents to teach their fellow Americans, especially youngsters, basic social values such as social caring and social responsibility.

          In order to support these values, social institutions, namely families, churches, and local community agencies such as schools have to be functioning enterprises in which basic moral lessons are taught and nurtured.  As early as 1993, Etzioni explains,

 

When the term community is used, the first notion that typically comes to mind is a place in which people know and care for one another – the kind of place in which people do not merely ask “How are you?” as a formality but care about the answer.  This we-ness (which cynics have belittled as a “warm fuzzy” sense of community) is indeed part of its essence.  Our focus here, though, is on another element of community, crucial for the issue at hand:  Communities speak to us in moral voices.  They lay claim on their members.  Indeed, they are the most important sustaining source of moral voices other than the inner self.[1]

 

Etzioni argues that to arrive at a society in which civility is the norm instead of the exception, the nation needs communities to be teachers of these moral voices.

          Are schools teaching a curriculum that emphasizes community and civility or are classrooms and their instruction places reinforcing the prevailing natural rights perspective?  Short of surveying classrooms, a look at the content of textbooks provides a window into what instructional position is being utilized.  Textbooks have been found to be the primary source of classroom content.[2]  Mark Schug, Richard Western, and Larry Enochs report,

 

Social studies teachers rely heavily on instruction dominated by textbooks. They organize their courses around textbooks, and they spend a good deal of class time on textbook assignments. They conduct recitation sessions on the textbook pages assigned the previous day; they introduce the next day's reading and allocate class time for students to get started doing it. To ensure that it does get done, they may direct students to read the text orally to one another in class. And periodically they administer quizzes and tests based on textbook chapters.  This tendency persists despite heavy criticism from within the profession.[3]

 

 And this blogger can testify – both from his professional use and research[4] – and agrees with John Patrick and John Hoge’s comment, “[d]ifferences in these books are slight, more degrees of variation than distinctions in types of subject-matter treatments.”[5]

          According to this blogger’s analysis of currently used textbooks that mirrored the findings of an informal survey conducted by the department head of Miami Beach Senior High School of Miami-Dade of selected department heads in the late 1990s, the following was found:

 

·     A description of federalism was limited to the structural arrangement between the national and state governments with no mention of its philosophic foundation.

·    There was no treatment of either civility or civil society.

·      The overwhelming space in the text is dedicated to the structural description of the national government as opposed to local/communal arrangements.

·      Only limited space is dedicated to participation in local political efforts and that is not in terms of a community perspective.

·      The only references to community in the index is to related topics that communities address – in the late 1990s, that was obscenity.

·     Individualism is amply fostered with three or so chapters dedicated to civil liberties.

·      There prevails in the texts a neutrality to moral issues.

 

Patrick and Hoge conclude in relation to this issue:

 

The textbooks in all levels of schooling tend to be supportive of the status quo.  Critical or alternative views of government and civic traditions in the United States tend to be missing from elementary textbooks and downplayed in secondary materials.  Bland, matter-of-fact presentations of content and the absence of controversy are hallmarks of treatments of government, civics, and law in schoolbooks.[6]

 

This blogger’s view of current textbooks concurs with that of these two writers.

          One can conclude from these sources that classrooms are following the prevailing natural rights perspective or as Michael Sandel calls it, the liberal political philosophy.  Unfortunately, that perspective promotes biases that often delegitimize communal and civil priorities.  There is a perspective which is true to individual rights but is also sensitive to community and civility that could be more functional in meeting the challenges facing American schools and the nation.

Such a perspective, it is argued here, is the liberated federalist perspective or what this blog calls, federation theory.  What will follow in future postings is a description of federation theory as a more sensitive and supportive communal view.  Current treatment of this view is given a limited conceptual role in civics classrooms.  The use of federalism has lost much of the essential definitional elements that composed its original meaning and with this, it has lost most of its importance.

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[1] Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community:  Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York, NY:  Crown Publisher, 1993), emphasis in the original.

[2] Mark C. Schug, Richard D. Western, and Larry G. Enochs, “Why Do Social Studies Teachers Use Textbooks?  The Answer May Lie in Economic Theory,” National Council for the Social Studies (n.d.), accessed November 28, 2021, http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/6102/610208.html AND 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.

[3] Schug, Western, and Enochs, “Why Do Social Studies Teachers Use Textbooks?  The Answer May Lie in Economic Theory,” NCSS.

[4] This blogger, for a book project he is working on, is adopting research he has done that reviews the two best selling government textbooks used at the high school level – Magruder’s American Government and Glencoe United States Government:  Democracy in Action.  The reader can read a “first draft” of that research by looking up in this blog’s archive, the posting, “Change in Substance Only,” April 17, 2020.  This cited post is the first of a series of related postings.

[5] John J. Patrick and John D. Hoge, “Teaching Government, Civics, and Law,” in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning edited by James P. Shaver (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 427-436.

[6] Ibid., 429.