AVOID THE EITHER/OR

 

On February 13^th, with the posting, “Early On,”[1] this blog began a series of offerings that argue American society has higher levels of deviant behavior than one finds in many other societies – particularly advanced countries.  This claim is hard to define and measure.  Here is what Statista reports:

 

In the United States, violent crimes are defined as incidents involving force or the threat of force. … Comparing the number of committed crimes in U.S. by category, property crime far outnumbers violent crime, while aggravated assault accounts for some two-thirds of all violent crime. Over the last two decades, the number of violent crimes in the United States has fallen dramatically; there were 1.93 million violent crimes in 1992 in comparison to 1.2 million violent crimes in 2022. A similar story is told by looking at the violent crime rate per 100,000 residents, which factors in the role population growth plays in increasing the overall number of crimes.[2]

 

Or as Data Pandas reports:

 

Despite being one of the world's most developed countries, the United States ranks 52^nd, with a Crime Index of 47.81. The relatively high index in an advanced nation like the U.S. underscores the fact that crime is not merely a problem of underdeveloped or developing countries but a universal challenge.[3]

 

While there are other nations with higher rates of crime and other forms of deviance, the above amply reports levels that should capture the nation’s attention. 

Of course, there are many factors involved in this state of dysfunction.  Using a historical approach, recent postings described the effects of various constructs, e.g., transcendentalism and perceptual psychology, in the development of this deviance.  The postings have attempted to explain how the claims of these constructs dispose their advocates to champion meaningful degrees of individualism and self-centeredness, mental dispositions one can see as disposing people to engage in deviant behavior.

          Consequently, such socialization has even led to problematic levels of other anti-social mindsets, even nihilism.  Of course, all of this can’t help affecting how civics education will be conducted in American schools.  A good deal of those effects are underlying factors and not conscious to the educators who man those classrooms.  But before describing what these forces mean to curriculum, it is important to keep in mind that this is a societal problem.  In no way can schools be given the task, single-handedly, of definitively solving the problem.

          While this disclaimer might seem obvious, it has been the practice of societal decision makers to dump many components of the above situation in the “laps” of educators.  Of course, this is counterproductive and only serves to stretch the limited resources schools have at their disposal to try to meet the educational responsibilities cited in these earlier postings.

          What this blog will describe is limited to how the curriculum can, from its perspective, consider the forces causing the dysfunctional elements of this state of being, i.e., a society full of deviant related strife.  This blogger hopes that interested parties understand the central source of these problems has had a long history and goes to the core of American attitudes. 

Again, it’s a cultural problem.  Only societal wide changes can shift these attitudes.  That aim is surely beyond the ability of schools to accomplish.  So, given all of this, what are the implications for social studies – that portion of curriculum most relevant to societal concerns emanating from its culture.

And here, a bit of context is in order:  The general custom among people, this blogger notes, is to think dichotomously.  In this case, either a person is authoritarian or democratic; either loves children or is indifferent to their needs.  These are lazy reactions.  The problems these postings address and the problems they have caused, place educators on guard against the easy, sentimentalist answers to those problems. 

In that vein, this blogger is not against many of the sentiments expressed by those expounding the virtues of individualism – often mistakenly treated as being synonymous with liberty.  The concern here lies in the fact that reality does not exist only in the domain of one’s own house and family, but also in the communal parameters individuals and families find themselves.

          The overall described conditions this blog has reviewed have implications for the social studies curriculum but also curriculum in general.  With a more contained ambition than is usually expressed by curriculum writers, what follows are adjustments that can allow a more useful posture given the challenges.  That is, a functional curriculum should adjust in certain dimensions:

 

1.     There should be a heavy emphasis on the concerns of communities – that in which a school’s students live and, in the nation, generally.

2.     Knowledge, as an element of a curriculum, should be treated beyond sets of facts to memorize, but as functional, useful elements in solving societal problems or addressing societal concerns.

3.     Curriculum proposals should be in the form of options that a teacher can manipulate, tweak, or otherwise accommodate the students and/or social conditions teachers face.  And …

4.     Discipline, beyond the prescriptions from perceptual psychology or any other strategy, should be treated by teachers in a realistic manner – avoiding simplistic generalized approaches (either too lenient, ala perceptual psychology, or too demanding, ala “I take no guff” approach).

 

These dimensions are suggested by the pioneer work on deviance by Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton.[4]

          While a formal development of an argument suggested by Durkheim and Merton is beyond the purposes of this presentation, these sociologists’ collective work presents a social model for explaining deviance.  And this marks a good place to end this posting and invite readers to click onto this blog’s next posting for a description of these giants’ contribution to addressing deviance. 

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[1] See Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024, “Representations of Reality,” February 16, 2024, “The TV Effect,” February 20, 2024, “The Perceptual Angle,” February 23, and The Ongoing Factors Affecting Nihilism, February 27, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.  Use archives feature to access individual postings,

[2] “Violent Crime in the U.S. – Statistics & Facts,” Statista, December 18, 2023, accessed February 28, 2024, URL:  https://www.statista.com/topics/1750/violent-crime-in-the-us/#topicOverview.

[3] “Crime Rate by Country,” Data Pandas (n.d.), accessed February 29, 2024, URL:  https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/crime-rate-by-country.  Out of 136 countries, the US is ranked the 56^th most crime ridden.

[4] Marshall B. Clinard, “The Theoretical Implications of Anomie and Deviant Behavior,” in Anomie and Deviant Behavior, edited by Marshall B. Clinard (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1964), 1-56.