An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
This posting continues a report on the expectation of schools that people
share as an element of the commonplace, the milieu, in curriculum development.[2] Central to this milieu in twenty-first
century America is the importance these Americans ascribe to individualism
which effectively sways the expectations they have of civics instruction.
Anil Ananthaswamy comments on how individualism
stacks up against other concerns. This
researcher writes,
There’s
actually a lot of agreement on the things that are considered to be most
essential such as respecting America’s political institutions and laws and
believing in individualism. There’s also
considerable agreement on things that are considered less essential, such as
the language one speaks, or whether someone was born in the US or has European
ancestry.[3]
Seymour M. Lipset provides an extensive study
of this American character trait. He
writes that Americans are exceptionally supportive of individualism and
anti-statism. Using comparative data, he
demonstrates how, compared to the other modern industrial nations, the US ranks
lower in taxes in such state-sponsored programs as welfare.[4] More recent studies continue to support these
claims.[5]
In short, Americans are highly suspicious of
governmental efforts to solve maladies and prefer private-for-profit approaches
to dealing with communal concerns. Even
public schools, some would argue, should shift to private-school arrangements.[6] In turn, these biases are not isolated but
are associated with many other views and concerns.
For example, Americans have a very pragmatic
view of education. Some have called this
pragmatism as being anti-intellectual.
Americans are wary of schools attempting to introduce academic subject
matter that they – the public – do not understand. This was exemplified all the way back to the
nation’s reaction to Sputnik in the late 1950s and 1960s and the reforms that
ensued which were unintelligible to the public in general. Those reforms enjoyed a short longevity and
were mostly dismissed within a decade.[7]
Americans believe education should be
purposeful, for the most part, toward practical career goals. While this has resulted in different approaches
used in schools over this century, a consistent antagonism toward highly
academic bias has pervaded American campuses.
Robert Maranto and Jonathan Wai share an interesting overview of
American education. In their abstract
introducing their study, they write,
Rooted
in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational
Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as “Taylorist” factories
with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over
cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education
theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence,
prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist.[8]
The natural rights
perspective matches closely to this seemingly consistent desire of the American
public. For one, it treats government as
a neutral institution. This blends with
the anti-statist position of most Americans.
While the systems approach recognizes the necessity of some government
presence, it does not advocate any particular form for that presence nor for it
to be extensive.
It leaves those types of
decisions to the political interplay of the American public through the expression
of demands and supports, mostly voting behavior. The instructional approach it favors does
address from whence existing political pressures originate, but it does so in
order for the student to gather explanations of the conditions that exist
without projecting political biases for policy alternatives.
The natural rights
perspective, with its reliance on political systems, is a fairly
straightforward construct avoiding difficult incursions into philosophic
arguments of political theory. The
natural rights perspective most closely meets the expectations of American
parents, i.e., that it should teach their youngsters what constitutes the
government structure and give them a straightforward explanation of why the
government is organized the way it is.
In doing so, it
definitely avoids such messaging as was associated with federalist notions of
communal, cooperative, and collaborative aims or goals that government should
pursue. In its stead, one finds language
that describes – and to a certain extent promotes – a transactional national
stage in which the various parties go about competing for political favor from
either government or other private parties.
This completes this
blog’s review of Americans’ expectations of their schools’ civics
instruction. Still to be covered are schools’
economic base and youth culture. With
that, this blog will complete its report on the commonplaces of curriculum
development as seen through the “eyes” of the natural rights construct.
[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]
Joseph Schwab presents his conception of the
commonplaces of curriculum development – they are subject matter, students, teachers, and milieu. See William
H. Schubert, Curriculum: Perspective,
Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:
MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).
[3] Anil Ananthaswamy, “American
Individualism and Our Collective Crisis,” Knowable Magazine, December 1,
2020, accessed October 23, 2022, https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2020/american-individualism-and-our-collective-crisis.
[4] Seymour M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY: W. W.
Norton and Company, 1996).
[5] See for example, “How Do US Taxes Compare
Internationally?,” Briefing Book, The Tax Policy Center, 2018, accessed
October 23, 2022, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally AND Robert Rector, “Poverty and the Social Welfare
State in the United States and Other Nations,” The Heritage Foundation,
September 16, 2015, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/poverty-and-the-social-welfare-state-the-united-states-and-other-nations#:~:text=As%20a%20share%20of%20GDP,5%5D%20Ibid.%2C%20p..
[6] For example, see “Top Benefits of Private School vs.
Public School,” Hotchkiss (n.d.), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.hotchkiss.org/top-benefits-of-private-school.
[7] For a short, but interesting, history, see Dave Roos,
“How the Cold War Space Race Led to US Students Doing Tons of Homework,” History
[Channel], August 13, 2019, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/homework-cold-war-sputnik#:~:text=The%20response%20from%20the%20U.S.,science%2C%20mathematics%20and%20foreign%20languages.
[8] Robert Maranto and Jonathan
Wai, “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice,
and What Can Be Done about It,” Journal of Intelligence, 8, 1 (March
2020), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151121/. “Taylorist” refers
to the work of Frederick Taylor on how production facilities, such as
factories, should be run. Central to his
view was the incorporation of mechanical and engineering principles to the
management of labor and other production elements.
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