AN ASSUMPTION AND A LIMITATION

 

This blog, over recent postings, has emphasized describing and explaining the theory upon which it is based.  And based on the concerns expressed by such a review, certain research questions become prominent.  Does a federalist perspective provide a legitimate and viable way to study government and politics at the secondary school level, i.e., in middle school and in high school?  There, the targeted courses would be civics and American government, respectively.

          This overall question leads to subsidiary questions.  They are concerned with those issues associated with the comparison between the natural rights perspective, dominant today, and the federalist perspective, promoted in this blog.  These views, in many ways, are at loggerheads not only about how government should rule, and politics should be conducted, but about how people should relate to that rule and to each other. 

Therefore, the subsidiary questions ask about the evolution of these opposing constructs as they have affected curriculum regarding the nation’s government and the general relationship that people have toward that governmental structure – both at the national and at the state levels.

They further ask about the desirable projection of how Americans should perceive the future – what would be ideal in the years to come.  Finally, any further questions inquire into the practical concerns of bringing desired ends into reality.  The subsidiary questions can be:

1.    How has the construct guiding the teaching of American government and civics evolved?

2.    What have been the salient consequences of that development?

3.    To what social arrangement should the development of a construct lead?

4.    How can a desirable social arrangement come about?

Through a description of the historical development of the effects of the two opposing perspectives, a clear comparison can and will be made. 

By critically analyzing that development, this blog has – from time to time – designated the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and has given a sense of the causal factors that led to the adoption and/or rejection of each as either the dominant or subordinate view.  A major implication of this blog is that once in that dominant position, many political acts ensue from that status.

To study that development, of course, certain assumptions need to be made – all studies make assumptions.  The above main and subsidiary questions assume that government and civics courses at the secondary level in American schools promote good citizenship.  This blog has been written under the assumed commitment – to whatever level – that civics’ curriculum content in the areas of government and politics can and should be part of a general socialization pattern whose ultimate goal is healthy, productive, and moral citizens.

While the definition of the term good citizenship has not been consistent in the literature of social studies, its general meaning has been included as central to the professional goals of that field since its inception in the early part of the 20^th century.[1]  And this is not unique to the US:

Since the birth of western civilization, education, especially instruction in what is today called history and social studies, has been to foster habits of good citizenship.  According to Aristotle, “that which contributes most of the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government.  The best laws will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and example in the spirit of the constitution.”[2]

 

The assumption is that this predisposition will continue to be adhered to in our school systems.

          Along with this assumption, the argument made in this blog also has limitations.  The effort is meant to encourage a pedagogical debate and pose a set of questions that are relevant to such a proposed change.  An area of such questions, for example, could include whether students in an era of natural rights philosophy can be shown that such a perspective is seriously dysfunctional to the preservation of democratic ideals and practices. 

This blogger is not totally surprised with all the talk about how this nation’s democracy is presently in danger.  The natural rights perspective is so pervasive that in the minds of Americans – or at least many of them – that that view has become synonymous with democracy and capitalism.  Again, from the late 1990s, the late prominent economist, Lester C. Thurow, provided a warning:

 

Unfortunately, neither capitalism nor democracy is a unifying ideology.  Both are process ideologies that assert that if one follows the recommended process, one will be better off than if one does not.  They have no “common good,” no common goals, toward which everyone is collectively working.  Both stress the individual and not the group … Neither imposes an obligation to worry about the welfare of the other [workers or businesses].

          When anyone talks about societies being organic, wholes, something more than the statistical summation of their individual members’ wants and achievements, both capitalists and democrats assert that there is no such thing.  In both, individual freedom dominates community obligations.  All political or economic transactions are voluntary.  If an individual does not want to vote, or buy something, that is his or her right.  If citizens want to be greedy and vote for their narrow self-interest at the expense of others, that is their right.  In the most rigorous expression of capitalistic ethics, crime is simply another economic activity that happens to have a high price (jail) if one is caught.  There is no social obligation to obey the law.  There is nothing that one “ought” not to do.  Duties and obligations do not exist.  Only market transactions exist.[3]

 

While such an expression might be true for pure capitalism, it totally ignores the federalist origins and foundation of American democracy.[4]  The hope is that a federalist view, if presented in a manner relevant to current conditions, can capture a reasonable level of legitimacy, if not commitment, among today’s school aged youth.

          This blog targets civics, but what is stated above extends to all of social studies and to how schools are organized.  Communal concerns should be a central component of any social study and, historically, federalism is about how Americans define communal approaches.[5]  Federalism “suggests that self-government works best when sovereignty is dispersed and citizenship formed across multiple sites of civic engagement.  This aspect of federalism informs the pluralist version of republican politics.”[6]

          In like manner, the federalist perspective has implications for the running of schools.  All of these proposed areas of concerns can be subsequent topics of research – either using an analytical or a positivist approach – stemming from the topics that this blog entertains.  For example, one such approach could employ a dialectic analysis in which a researcher can visualize the overarching struggles dotting American history. 

This blog will in future postings pursue this approach, but before it does, a bit more context needs to be shared in the immediate postings to follow. That means some general historical staging needs to take place before one is ready to appreciate how and why a particular form of governance took hold.

 

[Reminder:  The reader is reminded that he/she can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, he/she can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit or click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then look up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] This blogger as a teacher and researcher of social studies can vouch that central not only to civics but to all social studies, the main goal is good citizenship.  But to buttress that assumption, see the recent source, respected Twitter-or, Jeanne DeJong’s Transylvanian Times article on the subject.  Jeanne DeJong, “Social Studies:  Developing Good Citizens,” Transylvanian Times (June 17, 2013), accessed December 1, 2021, https://www.transylvaniatimes.com/story/2013/06/17/education/social-studies-developing-good-citizens/13592.html AND Michael B. Lybarger, “The Historiography of Social Studies: Retrospect, Circumspect, and Prospect,” in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, ed. James P. Shaver (New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 3-15.

[2] Lybarger, “The Historiography of Social Studies, in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, 3.

[3] Lester C. Thurow, Head to Head:  The Coming Battle among Japan, Europe, and America (New York, NY:  William Morrow and Company, Inc.), 159.

[4] The reference here is to the covenantal/compact-al origins of the American republic emanating from the Puritanical settlements throughout the colonial areas but centering in the Massachusetts of New England.

[5] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly!” In a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar (1994), prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1-30.

[6] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 347.

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.