MITIGATING INFLUENCES

Note:  Due to technical problems beyond my control, this posting is a day late.

A former colleague and current friend, Dr. Alejandro Gallard, writes of the contextual realities that affect the effectiveness of classroom efforts.  I have shared many times in this blog the complex nature of the typical classroom and this is the case in even the most “simplified” situations:  a mono-cultural setting.  But when you add to the mix students who vary in ethnicity and cultural backgrounds, linguistic diversity, even varying ages, possible levels of poverty, long term unemployment and so forth, things can and do get scrambled and difficult for a teacher who is trying to implement a curriculum that is set by district officials sufficiently removed from that classroom.  And today, in many areas of the country, curricular writing has become a political football with varying agendas being played out.  Don’t get me wrong; I do recognize that setting curricula is a political exercise – it’s unavoidable and this is especially the case in times like ours when there is such partisan rancor all about.

Gallard introduces a concept that I believe is helpful.  He mentions contextual mitigating factors.  This is a term that encapsulates the complexities of which I refer to above.  His area of interest is science education and even in a subject area more prone to objectified content, these factors do not stay outside the classroom door.  They impede there just as much as in the more politically oriented material one deals with in civics.  One just has to mention such issues as evolution to be reminded of how political biology can be.  Then there is sex education and other family issues based on physically related concerns – e. g., vaccination – and one can see that controversy is not so far removed from science education.

Gallard’s main concerns revolve around contextual mitigating factors that influence the success rate of various ethnic populations in the field of science.  Specifically, he has been studying the factors that are at play with the relatively unsuccessful rates among Latinas.  But whatever or wherever the results are short of what is desired, I believe Gallard’s sentiments should be kept in mind:

Nothing ever happens in a classroom that doesn’t have mitigating factors that teachers need to deal with … [s]omething from the outside is always going to influence what the teacher wants to do inside the classroom.  It can be poverty; it can be contrasting belief systems or all sorts of things.  I am a strong believer that education needs to be looked at through multiple contextual lenses in which all teaching and learning takes place.  These influencing factors or contextual mitigating factors must be made explicit and dealt with before one can expect meaningful education reform to take place.[1]

For those of you who have been readers of this blog from its early days, this type of rationale might sound familiar.  Gallard can be judged to be a critical educator of the reconceptualism school of thought.  As I wrote back in those days, critical educators have interesting and useful things to tell us and we should give them our collective ear.

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[1] Bennett, S. (2015).  Closing gaps:  Meet Georgia Southern’s Goizueta distinguished chair of education.  Georgia Southern Magazine, Spring, 17(2), p. 24.

MINIMUM DIGNITY

Here’s a civics lesson.  It has to do with the issue of the minimum wage.  The Obama administration has been advocating a raise in the minimum wage:  “It’s time to give America a raise.”  Of course, business friendly conservatives oppose such a move – not surprising.  What’s a federalist’s take?

Well, here is mine.  I believe that central to federalist thinking is the value of collective members having as much as possible – that is, as much as possible within reasonable parameters – equal standing, equal consent.  That is, further, that each member of the collective is not coerced into either belonging or doing his/her expected roles within the collective, any collective.  That goes for a family, a church, a community organization, a labor union, a city, a state, a nation.  When we speak of the larger collectives, such as cities or nations, more abstract means of membership, stake commitments, and coercion are involved.  By more abstraction, a commensurable use of numbers comes into play as trends and averages are used to determine to what degree interactions are based on federated notions of membership and participation.  And with this context, such an issue as the minimum wage takes on importance.

One’s work, in a federated union, is more than just an economic activity.  For most, work takes up significant portions of one’s life; it provides sustenance both psychological and physical.  It is a communitive statement of belonging, contributing, and a source of relative importance within the collective.  To maintain the federalist character of a collective, to the extent possible, each job or career should provide certain assets:  enough remuneration so as to secure survival needs for one’s family, enough education to stay true to the value of equal opportunity, enough entertainment to support mental health, and enough time with fellow family members so that the required time away from them does not become a cause of family dysfunction.  In short, what one makes in terms of pay becomes not just a number on a ledger in some business accounting book, but a statement of human dignity.

Yet this perspective is not shared by all.  If it were, I would say the minimum wage would have, in real terms, kept up with increases in productivity.  Attempts to study this question in terms of “keeping up with inflation” can be tricky.  I prefer my above approach.  Students should be exposed to every which way it is measured – and the internet very easily can help students with that.  But a class can use my “federalist” approach and then can be exposed to an array of conservative arguments against raising the rate.  Below, I offer four such arguments derived from a book review of Arthur C. Brooks’ book, The Conservative Heart:  How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Productive America.[1]

Arguments against raising the minimum wage:

·        The main argument is that if you raise the price of anything, you lower the amount of it being purchased.  That goes for fruit, furniture, or workers’ time and labor.  So, and this is the main offense, it limits the number of people who can “earn success” – the basis of true happiness.

·        Raising the minimum wage will raise the costs of production that will be only passed on to consumers.  So, for example, an industry hard hit by this move will be the fast-food restaurant chains that are frequented heavily by low income customers.  It is, therefore, low income people who will be paying these increased costs.

·        Minimum wage increase will not hit, to a large measure, those who are meant to be benefited.  This is because a raise in the minimum wage will go to individuals above the poverty line.  Half of the beneficiaries live in family households that make over $35,000 a year and a quarter go to families that make over $75,000 a year.  A mandated raise in the minimum wage is ill targeted, missing, to a significant level, the low income population it is meant to help.

·        Last (at least in terms of this book’s offering), raising the minimum wage is not as good a policy in helping the working poor as providing earned-income tax credits which will increase the take-home pay of such workers.  Credits do this by finely targeting the benefit to those who need it.  I find this curious in that a lot of conservative rhetoric is geared toward that portion of the work force who “don’t pay taxes.”

Students can review the literature about measuring the minimum wage over time, discuss the various ways of evaluating government policy concerning the minimum wage, and then review, discuss, and evaluate the conservative arguments against raising the minimum wage using a federalist criterion I provide above.

By and by, can conservatives come up with one policy position that does not equate to higher profits for businesses?  Just asking.

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[1] Mankiw, N. G.  (2015).  Compassionate conservative.  The New York Times, Book Review section, August 2, p. 10.

DOUBLING DOWN

In a previous posting, I gave out some advice; it was:  don’t give any donations to a charitable or non-profit organization unless that organization has opened up its books.  My main concern in that posting was the history of secrecy surrounding the workings of the Vatican Bank and all the questionable dealings that secrecy enabled on the part of Roman Catholic Church officials.  Apparently, US non-profits do, by law, have to open up their financial statements.  More specifically, they have to submit Form 990 to the IRS and these forms are not confidential.  On that form, they have to divulge quite a bit of information.  They have to give their tax related finances, salaries of their key officials, and the names of key employees.  But, according to an article about the Koch brothers, The New York Times reports that non-profits do not have to report who their contributors are.[1]  These sources of information are far from being completely open and forthcoming.  This has become an issue with donors to the Clinton Initiative, for example, and questions about potential influence such donors might have on Hillary Clinton, a current presidential candidate, have been discussed.  Of course, this type of issue becomes important in a democracy:  how much is the voice of the people compromised when a relatively few can, by various means, buy public policy?  One such means can very well be donations to non-profit organizations.  Other nefarious aims can include the use of non-profit donations to instigate or hide illegal activities such as laundering money.  Again, such activities harm the quality of a democracy and the spirit of a federalist ethos.

So again, let me advise:  if you have the time – it wouldn’t take many of you – only give to non-profit organizations and charities that are completely transparent in their dealings and records.  There’s enough public secrecy plaguing our public discourse and interaction.  Here is one area in which we can affect how business is being done.  And encouraging a disposition to be so proactive can begin by informing civics students of the problem and even assigning investigative projects that might look into local non-profits that operate in the communities where they reside.

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[1] Confessore, N.  (2015).  Koch brothers brave spotlight to alter image.  The New York Times, July 31, pp. 1A & 17A.

SOMETHING SMELLS IN THE TRUNK

There are certain things we hear repeatedly told about certain states in the union.  For instance, we hear of nasty New Jerseyans exemplified by their governor or that Illinois governors eventually land up in prison or stubborn Missourians need to be shown something before believing it or – and this has even gotten a special recurring segment on a TV show – the dumb things that happen in Florida putting the duh in “Floriduh.”[1]  But how about the following type of state story?

Suppose we hear in the news what has become a typical story from the state of Ohio:  in a northern town of that state, two men lured the mayor to a meeting for the purpose of shooting him because they wanted to keep secret years of plundering the town’s treasury with the mayor’s assistance.  After the mayor was shot, he was crammed into the trunk of his car.  Upon capture and adjudication of the two killers, they were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, but were able to draw a partial paycheck from a job they were not really needed to perform since they were employed in a bloated workplace.  This story, let me continue, is situated amid a backdrop of repeated incidents of scams that Ohioans have perpetrated for decades, often involving state officials.

For example, the state is notorious for regular occurrences of tax fraud and common corruptions which have drained state revenues – which, by the way – state officials had been able to keep hidden from bond markets until the financial crisis hit in 2009.  At that point, the facts hit the fan and now cheap loan dollars are hard for the state officials to find – as in non-existent – resulting in state coffers facing $430 billion in debts.  As a consequence, the state is facing enforced austerity measures:  severe cuts in government subsidy programs, large layoffs in government sponsored businesses and government programs, and drastic cuts and reforms in the state’s overly generous pension program.  In return for these measures, the Federal Reserve will extend the state a $146 billion bailout to meet its pending interest payment obligations and put the state on track to eventually work itself out of yearly deficits and overall debt in which it has placed itself.  And suppose further that there is talk of pushing Ohio out of the union and having it face its own fate.  Okay, okay; it’s not Ohio and the United States union, but Greece and the European Union.  And it’s not the Federal Reserve, but what is called the troika:  the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank.[2]  If it were Ohio, the emission option would be off the table unless a constitutional amendment would be ratified to expunge such a renegade state as depicted above.  But then again, if Greece belonged to a union as that formed by the US Constitution, I believe things would not have been allowed to get so out of hand.

And maybe something can be said about what could be a false expectation; I don’t know.  That is, can we expect a federation to be erected and maintained across national entities, at least of the type hoped for by the establishment of a European union?  What cultural prerequisites have to be in place in order to build a more unified economic zone as that contemplated by the Europeans embarking on their Euro Zone project?  These are federalist questions that civics instruction should look at in order to appreciate how special our national union is and how it should not be taken for granted.  Our history has demonstrated how fragile this bonded existence can be.  What can we learn from Greece and its current travails?

Why Ohio?  It is roughly comparable in population to Greece each having just over 11 million people.  And by the way, before you think I somehow dislike Greece, I admire its life expectancy rate:  over 80 years.  They’re doing some things right.

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[1] Remember, I’m from Florida.

[2] The facts of this story are derived from a book review:  Hammer, J.  (2015).  Spartan Measures.  The New York Times, Book Review section, July 5, p. 19.  The book reviewed is The Full Catastrophe:  Travels among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos.

TRUMP’S VALUES?

In this blog, I have written of trump values.  I’ve pointed out that the trump value of natural rights adherents is liberty; the trump value of critical theorists is equality; the trump value of federalists, as far as I am concerned, is societal welfare.  What is the trump value of Trump, Donald Trump that is?  In his latest incarnation, that of a presidential candidate, he is sacrificing a lot – contract arrangements that either provide or potentially provide huge profits – so as to lead the nation to be great again.  Can we trust this man?

A guru, Robert Greene, of business acumen, instructs us that a typical strategy or law of power is the following:

Deception is always the best strategy, but the best deceptions require a screen of smoke to distract people’s attention from your real purpose.  The bland exterior – like the unreadable poker face – is often the perfect smoke screen, hiding your intentions behind the comfortable and familiar.  If you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you lead him into a trap.[1]

Do these words of advice, cynical as they are, apply to the Donald?

Before analyzing Trump’s motives in relation to this advice, let me share a bit of further thinking that is relevant to this situation.  Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, a fairly contemporary Indian philosopher (he died in 1990), came up with a cyclical theory of history.  Short of reviewing the whole theory here, let me briefly report what his thinking outlined, a view of any society as being made up of four basic groups.  The vast majority of a population, according to the theory, consists of labor.  This portion of the population is basically concerned with survival and arranging for reasonable levels of comfort and security for themselves and their families.  The remaining – ten percent or so – is made up of people who are ambitious and want to advance themselves in meaningful ways.  They are talented, in one of basically three ways:  bodily skills, intellectual skills, or acquisitive skills.  By bodily skills, I am referring to dexterity or athletic skills.  Intellectual skills revolve around skills in devising and manipulating ideas.  Acquisitive skills are about securing and even creating material goods and services or the means to acquire those resources namely by the acquisition of money.  The theory goes on to describe the cyclical progression of history as being one in which these three ambitious groups, in a certain order, take turns in running a society – one being the prominent group that holds or controls the levers of power.  For example, we in the US are in control of the acquisitive group.  For outlined reasons, the order of progression is:  the warrior group (bodily skills), intellectuals, and then those motivated by acquiring skills.  Each era of control can last about two to three hundred years.  I was introduced to this theory by reading Ravi Batra in a popular book of the late 1980s.[2]

So what pushes Trump’s buttons:  societal welfare or acquisition?  I don’t know.  But I believe trust needs to be earned.  Here, we have a person who has dedicated a lifetime to acquiring a lot of money – by his own repeated admission – and material resources.  Should we trust that he has evolved and has said to himself:  I have enough and now I want to look beyond my immediate interests and sacrifice for the nation?  Or are we “suckers” being deceived?

Back to the above advice.  No one will accuse Trump of being bland.  But Greene gives us a modification to the law.  When one is successful in deceiving, one is apt to make a reputation.  Greene offers the example of B. T. Barnum.  So outrageous were his tricks and reputation that he became a source of entertainment.  Is Trump’s flamboyancy such a source; is it so outrageous that we are willing to pay the price of admission to see the show?  And the price here is the presidency.  I believe not, but who knows?  After all, as Soren Kierkegaard pointed out:  “The world wants to be deceived.”[3]

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[1] Greene, R.  (1998).  The 48 laws of power.  New York, NY:  Penguin Books.  Quotation on p. 23.

[2] Batra, R.  (1987).  The great depression of 1990:  Has it already started coming true?  New York, NY:  Dell Publishing.

[3] Quoted in Greene, p. 30.

THE ELEPHANT

In this blog, I have pointed out the importance of the subconscious in determining behavior.  I have read the analogy of seeing the conscious mind as a rider on top of an elephant, the subconscious.  While the rider can sort of guide the elephant, once the enormous animal determines to go a certain way, the rider is just that: someone going along for the ride.  I would say that most of our education assumes that the subconscious, at best, is an incidental source or determiner of our behavior.  This is a faulty assumption in that it gives short shrift to the true nature of the power the subconscious plays in our decision-making processes.  This is especially true in our social studies, including our civics instruction.

This bias is not a product of mal-intent.  It is a product, mostly, of ignorance, an ignorance not limited to our educators but to us generally.  But this is changing, and quite quickly.  There is a significant amount of relatively recent and current research on the role our subconscious plays in decision-making.  One insight that has emerged from this research is the relative strength of the subconscious in its ability to take in information.  Some estimates hold that the mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any one time, whereas the conscious mind is limited to forty pieces of information.  What the conscious mind does is create narratives out of all that information.  And the thing is that subconscious information is hot, as in laced with emotions.  The conscious puts order to all that, but it does not eliminate those feelings.[1]

One unfortunate bit of history is that our concern with the subconscious was initiated with the work of Sigmund Freud.  Not to denigrate the contributions of Freud, but he placed our awareness of the subconscious with sexual drives.  Yes, sex is part of the story, but only one part.  A lot more is going on with our subconscious.  One other concern, for example, is our views of politics and governance.  Therefore, civics related theory and planning need to address the effects of the subconscious on political decisions.  We need a whole area of research that addresses this area of our thinking and feeling.

I will leave you with one thought.  Our subconscious has, as we approach adulthood, a great deal of subconscious “baggage” when it comes to politics.  This is true even for those young people who don’t give much conscious thought to the subject.  A lot of it can be of the nature that “justifies” a person’s indifference.  Even for those people, as the experiences of life might intrude in this indifference, such as when confronted with unexpected taxes or fees, or an un-neighborly neighbor, or an unpleasant encounter with a policeperson, these subconscious feelings and ill-defined beliefs come into play.  Even for this type of person, one finds it difficult to have an objective discussion about the problem.  That built-up baggage plays its role, and conclusions about authority and government readily interfere with the now involved person being able to see what is really going on.  In such a state, a person finds it difficult to interact in mutually advantageous ways.

I will, in future postings, visit this subject again.

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[1] Brooks, D.  (2011).  The social animal:  The hidden sources of love, character, and achievement.  New York, NY:  Random House.

PLEASE

Have you noticed that a lot of our current political debate often questions disagreements in terms of legitimacy?  That is, opponents of a given policy are not content with attacking the prudence of the policy, they instead ratchet up the stakes by claiming said policy is somehow unconstitutional or immoral or both.  One recurring line of argument goes like this:  the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to implement the program or regulation that the government has put into effect.  After all, the Constitution doesn’t say, for example, anything about healthcare.  Or the Constitution doesn’t say anything about providing unemployment insurance.  Yet the federal government has instituted programs that do exactly that.  The powers of the federal government are delegated powers and, therefore, the federal authority has limited powers; it is not free to just legislate any old thing that the contemporary set of lawmakers wishes to initiate.  Is this true?  Are programs such as Affordable Healthcare and Social Security plainly illegitimate exercises of power?

Let’s look at the delegated powers of the United States.  They, for the most part, are found in Article I, Section 8.  That portion reads as follows:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Now some of this language sounds a bit specific.  For example,

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States …

This provision allowed the federal government to establish Washington, D. C.  But most of the language is not specific and is subject to a wide range of interpretations.  For example,

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States …

“Provide for … general Welfare of the United States”?  Please; the purpose of the founders of this republic was to form a government that could govern, period.  Add to this the power to regulate interstate and international commerce and you have a government that does not need to have specific reference in the Constitution to establish and maintain any program the Tea Party, libertarians, or any other faction of the extreme right wing wants to undermine with inflammatory language - language that questions their legitimacy on constitutional grounds.

And which body determines the meaning and constitutionality of any law?  Not Congress, not the President, but the Supreme Court and that court provides this function as citizens bring legal action that questions the constitutionality of a specific law.  And each of the laws and programs that the extreme right wing has objected to has been so questioned and has been deemed legitimate under the auspices of the Constitution. 

Enough with the language; those who use it are undermining the legitimacy of our government and are adding to the general level of cynicism.  This is not justified and is very harmful to the general welfare.