An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
[Note: This blog, in the postings
entitled “Judging the Natural Rights View, I-XVI, started with “An advocate of parochial
federalism continues his/her presentation …”
It should have read “An advocate of natural rights …” Please excuse the mistake. The archived record has been corrected.]
This blog has been reviewing the essentialist approach to education. The last entry promised this posting would
begin with a final word on students’ personal interests (as a commonplace in
curricular development – the learner) before moving on to social students’
interests. And that word is that the
classroom should be a disciplined environment.
“Genuine and lasting freedom is won and preserved by the systematic
discipline of learning what needs to be learned for survival in a civilized
society.”[2]
In that spirit, students’
personal interests would be further advanced if those students have a clear
understanding of authority. And that
begins with restoration of teachers as the central authority figures in the
nation’s classrooms. “… [C]hildren had a
right to expect and to receive adult guidance and direction.”[3] Or as stated more recently, discipline and
its related issues are somewhat complex and deserve to be addressed with varied
forms of guidance:
Certainly, fair and reasonable
policies governing serious and chronic behavior problems, as well as the
strategic use of rewards, should be part of a school-wide discipline program.
However, effective schools make this only one part of a much more comprehensive
plan. A comprehensive school-wide plan consists of a full range of
evidence-based strategies and techniques to achieve four important goals: (a)
developing self-discipline, (b) preventing misbehavior, (c) correcting
misbehavior, and (d) remediating and responding to serious and chronic behavior
problems. Strategies for each of these components of comprehensive school-wide
discipline follow.[4]
In short, schools need not add to the confusion
– the last posting noted – that is experienced in too many homes, but to take
on sophisticated disciplinary policies that meet the needs of their students,
the schools, and the communities in which they are practiced. Again, the focus is on helping students
become responsible adults.
Social Students’ Interests
As the social view of
children expands during their development, they reorganize mentally the way
they perceive social issues. That is,
adolescents change from fairly concrete cognitive views to more abstract ways
of thinking.[5] Joseph Adelson writes that an anti-utopianism
is an integral element of adolescent political thinking.[6] While basically unidealistic, young people in
Adelson’s studies demonstrated low levels of critical thinking.
The young peoples’
positions seemed to be attempts to move away from naïve, childish notions to
sophisticated adult ideation without giving studied issues or associated
political opinions much reflection, study, or thought. Adelson writes that the youths’ attitudes
narrowly span “from fatuous complacency to sharp and succinct wishes for change,
the latter very much within the system.”[7]
The natural rights
perspective, with its reliance on a systems approach of analysis, offers a
reasonable degree of abstraction that not only addresses adolescents’ abilities
to think more conceptually but also analyzes the political system from a
realistic point of view. It explains the
interactions associated with politics, not from overly idealistic or value-based
eyes, but from a matter-of-fact perspective.
Raewyn Connell’s stages of political thinking development
argue that adolescents are able not only to conceive of hierarchies within the
political systems, but also to see and appreciate conflicts between those who
hold varying opinions and interests.[8] If this theorizing is correct, this type of insight
is essential to handle political systems analysis.
In addition, the political systems approach can
and should be used to analyze any social organization.[9] Therefore, an understanding of the political
systems approach would be useful to students trying to bring understanding to
any social organization to which youths might belong or with which they need to
interact. Perhaps classroom instruction
can make those connections by providing examples of how any given system
operates.
By referring to churches, worksites, clubs,
etc., students can relate to how different elements of those organizations must
interact and how different structural/functional arrangements are set and
manipulated to handle stress within the respective systems. In addition, these types of studies would highlight
how ubiquitous the nature of politics and its power relations are. Such instruction might prove to be highly
useful to students securing the benefits they hope to attain through their
membership or association with such organizations.
And with that hope, this blog will, in the next
posting, begin to address economic students’ interests.
[1] This presentation continues with this posting. The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present. This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.
[2] Gerald L. Gutek, Basic Education: A Historical Perspective (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1981), 18.
[3] Ibid., 17.
[4] George Bear, “Discipline: Effective School Practices,” National
Association of School Psychologists (n.d.), accessed September 25, 2022, https://apps.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/books-and-products/samples/HCHS3_Samples/S4H18_Discipline.pdf.
[5] Param Davies, “9 Ways Thinking Will Help Teens Reason
Better,” Moms.com (February 11, 2021), accessed September 25, 2022, https://www.moms.com/abstract-thinking-helps-teens-reason-better/ AND Joseph Adelson, “Rites of Passage,” American
Education, 62 (Summer, 1982), 6-13.
[6] Joseph Adelson, “The Political Imagination of the
Young Adolescent,” in Twelve to Sixteen:
Early Adolescent, edited by Jerome Kagan and Robert Coles (New York,
NY: Norton, 1972), 106-144.
[7] Ibid., 130.
[8] Raewyn Connell, The Child’s Construction of
Politics (Carleton, Victoria:
Melbourne University Press, 1971).
[9] Daniel Katz and Robert Louis Kahn, The Social
Psychology of Organizations (New York, NY:
John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1966).
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