AN ORDERLY APPROACH TO CURRICULUM

If you recall, when I reviewed the four main curricular philosophies, I arranged them from the most conservative to the most liberal or transformative.  That list was perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionism.  In this posting, I will begin my review of the approaches to curriculum development.  They tend to be somewhat arranged from conservative to liberal, but they are better thought of as being arranged from the most technical/scientific to the most humanist/artistic.  The approaches I will identify and describe are behavioral, managerial, systems, academic, humanistic, and reconceptualist approaches.  So, let us begin with the behavioral approach.[1]

The origin of this approach starts in the 1920s at the University of Chicago and the person most identified with its initial development is Franklin Bobbitt.  To get a sense of its early appeal, one needs to remember that the prevailing perception among the professional classes of the time was the then inspiring marvels that were being created by the industrial plants around the nation.  Not only were they producing the great mechanical wonders that were beginning to enter even the home by way of labor saving appliances – for example, washers, refrigerators, and automobiles – but they were also being produced with increased efficiency – the assembly line, time and motion studies, etc.  What developed, according to Raymond Callahan, was a “cult of efficiency.”[2]  This movement, if you will, had repercussions throughout the professional world including education.

At the base of this movement was a reliance on science and technology.  In terms of production processes, the ideas of Frederick Taylor became highly influential.  His innovative ideas concerning time and motion, cost cutting, and reliance on quantitative measures revolutionized how things were produced.  The effect on education was pervasive.  The schoolhouse began to be viewed as a production facility, a factory, in which raw materials were brought in and worked on and shipped out as finished products.  In a school, what was the main raw material?  Students.  They arrived relatively ignorant and they left relatively educated – the final product.  The question became:  how cheaply – how efficiently – could that production process be conducted?  Several practices were introduced that are now considered as just the way education is done:  from the bells indicating when production processes began and ended, to specialization according to subject matter and teaching skills, to increased teacher-student ratios, to lower salaries for teachers.  This is just a sampling of these educational innovations that were institutionalized during this period.

While all of this is part of curricular concerns – remember, curriculum is the strategic plan at a school that affects what and how students learn – those aspects of schooling that directly and overtly affected the planning of learning experiences were also changed.  Here, a string of curricular pioneers began a series of innovations; they include the aforementioned Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba.  From the early part of the last century, Bobbitt and Charters introduced into the curricular language such concerns as goals, objectives, and measured outcomes which were to be demonstrated by observable behaviors.  We began to speak of units of instruction – and later modules – which broke down what was to be taught into manageable segments of material.  The language was also more definitive as these learning segments were made up of clear and precise activities that the students performed in order to accomplish desired behaviors, be they answering questions on a test or successfully accomplishing some skilled task.  An early published work by Bobbitt had over 800 objectives accompanied by clearly stated activities designed to accomplish those objectives.  The plans were the “means” by which identified, stated “ends” were to be attained; that is, measurable behaviors.

As you might have guessed, much of this approach is based on behaviorist psychology.  And like the development of behaviorist psychology, it has mellowed in its ideas through the decades.  The thinking within this approach originally saw learning as just one illustrative example of the stimulus-response view that behaviorists such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner advanced.  Today, this view of psychology has changed by incorporating findings of other schools of thought, such as those of the cognitive tradition.  The current field of behavioral economics demonstrates that transition – a field that has much to offer education and change theory.

Through the years, this original orientation of technical proficiency has also softened through the works of Tyler and Taba.  Tyler, in the late 1940s, developed a curricular development model that still has significant influence in the curriculum field.  His model took into account more localized, social factors that affect the learning process.  His three origins of curriculum: the student, the social environment, and the subject matter, and his “screens,” social philosophy and learning theory, took a large step toward humanizing the curriculum development process as conceptualized by the behavioral approach.  Taba’s work was more influential in how educators viewed instructional development.  Both took into account more psychological aspects that are unique to individuals that affect their peculiar learning process, but maintain much of the rigor that this approach introduced to education.  Both still saw learning as a rational development, albeit not so orderly as originally conceived by the earlier proponents of this approach.  While I do not consider myself a behaviorist, I do appreciate the ability of identifying those aspects or factors that one needs to address in curriculum work that is offered by the Tyler model.  And I try to view curriculum as needing to take into account the fact that students are individuals with their own cognitive functions and who lead their lives within varying social contexts.  As such, I agree with Ornstein and Hunkins; the behavioral approach will not only survive, but will also continue to be the one approach by which others will be compared.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] Callahan, R.  (1962).  Education and the cult of efficiency.  Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press.

A CONTEXT FOR CURRICULAR APPROACHES

This blog is going to, with this posting, take a bit of a turn.  I am going to place more emphasis on the notion of change.  I have already addressed this general concern quite a bit.  My aim is to share what I know about instituting change at a school site or any organizational setting.  My reason for this shift is that I hope my promotion of federalist theory might motivate some out there to seek a change in their local schools toward this approach in civics education.  Another reason is that what I know about change overlaps, a great deal, with federalist thought.  So by writing about change theory, I am addressing two issues at once.  I have delved into change theory and have posted a significant amount of material.  I even offered a model of what a change agent might encounter in terms of the individuals he or she encounters in a change effort.  This posting will begin to address the target of a relevant change project; that is, this posting will look at curriculum, per se.  After all, my overall aim is to have federalist theory be the construct that guides curriculum developers and curriculum workers – from teachers to national curriculum professionals – in selecting the content for government and civics courses of study at the secondary level.

In my general comments concerning curriculum, let me identify my main source of general curricular information.  There are a number of books that provide introductions to the topic of curriculum and curricular theory.  I will be primarily using Curriculum:  Foundations, Principles, and Issues by Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  This introduction is in its seventh edition.  As for my treatment of curriculum, I will not be about making you a curriculum expert.  My more modest endeavor is to share with you those aspects of curriculum that help a parent or some other interested citizen in instituting a change in the curricular offerings at a local school.  I might also include the average teacher as a potential audience for this “instruction.”  Teacher preparation programs do not expend a lot of effort in teaching their students about curricular theory.  The idea is that the average teacher is charged with implementing the existing curriculum, not with questioning or meddling in what the curriculum is, either in its entirety or in part.  As I have pointed out in this blog, for the average teacher, the curriculum consists of taking the provided textbook and “teaching it” from cover to cover.  That teacher does not question or even think to question why the particular textbook was chosen or if the subject matter could be taught in a different way or for different aims and goals.

In this blog, I have already addressed other aspects of curriculum.  I have, for example, distinguished curriculum from instructional plans.  The former is more the strategic aspect of planning and instructional plans the more logistical application of the curriculum.  I have critiqued what I view characterizes most curricular efforts in our nation’s schools, particularly curricula that are in place concerning civics education.  I find it appalling how little effort is made to make sure curricular decisions by the state or the school district are made to ensure that regular teachers are either understanding of, loyal to, or abiding by those decisions.  Most teachers are out there with little direction about what options are available or are engaged in little discussion as to curricular issues.  Please, don’t interpret this as my belief that we have a teacher corps that can be described as a bunch of mavericks.  As I just pointed out, most teachers simply follow the textbook that is chosen by a school’s administration from a limited number of approved titles.  Teachers might have a say in which text will actually be chosen, but the options available pretty much mirror each other in content and organizational structure.

I also addressed the different curricular philosophies – I called them educational philosophies – that exist.  They are perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionalism.  This description is a good lead into what I want to next address, curricular approaches.  Most treatments of this material begin with the curricular approaches that are out there and later describe the different prominent philosophies.  I feel it is best to reverse that order.  Philosophies get at motivation and, for me, that is always helpful to know before getting into the more specific aspects of what people are doing.  Therefore, initially getting a grasp of curricular philosophies provides useful foundational information.  If it is helpful, let me point out the postings that looked at the different philosophical traditions.  The titles and dates of these postings are A Socratic Interlude (2/19/16), No Nonsense Education (2/23/16), Live and Learn (2/26/16), The Ideological Leftists (3/1/16), and The Heroic Self (3/4/16).  If you did not catch these postings, they are available; just click the archives feature of this blog.  Those postings are arranged so as to describe the range of philosophies from the most conservative to the most liberal.  With that view of motivational orientations, one can look more confidently at the different approaches that curriculum developers utilize. 

I will point out that the field of curriculum, as Ornstein and Hunkins describe it, is a quarrelsome field.  This level of disagreement ranges from definitional issues to developmental issues to issues of implementation.  That’s right; the professionals in this field can’t even agree on what it is they are doing or what their responsibilities are.  But be calm; this debate is in academia.  For the rest of us, the field is about what is taught in our schools in terms of subject matter and its structural elements.

I noticed on TV that there is a commercial college, one that specializes in the field of management and employs an experiential instruction strategy.  This choice reflects a curricular issue and, in turn, a curricular or educational philosophy.  So if you are not satisfied with merely putting a degree on the wall, but want to bust the walls down, that’s the place for you – so I’m told.

So, my next efforts will be to convey the different approaches to curriculum.  Ornstein and Hunkins inform me that there are two basic types of approaches, the technical/scientific and the nontechnical/nonscientific types.  Under the technical/scientific there is the behavioral approach, the managerial approach, and the systems approach.  The academic approach and the reconceptionalist approach comprise the nontechnical/nonscientific type. 

If most schools are immune to the issues all these options represent and if most teachers just follow a textbook, why take the time to deal with these issues?  Because, one, being introduced to this material will provide context for what is going on in the school with which you are concerned; two, being knowledgeable of the material can be a source of ideas for what is possible or desirable in terms of curricular choices; and three, being aware of the material provides you with a language by which to discuss and, if need be, argue the related issues that curricular change entails. 

CLASHING IMAGES

We’re in it again, the presidential election season.  You might say we’ve been in it for a while.  Yes, people have been running around the country and saying vote for me for over a year.  Trump announced his candidacy a year ago last June 16^th.  I maintain that Clinton has been running for four years.  Evidence?  Did you happen to see the video that was produced when she left the State Department which featured a long list of foreign leaders who provided testimony as to her effectiveness as secretary?  I felt then that she was running for the highest office in the land.  But now we have entered the time when the average citizen will take note of what is happening as it pertains to the upcoming election.  The conventions are, for many, the first conscious attention they expend on the question:  whom will I vote for come November?  This election, more than most, brings to the fore a theme I have been writing about since this blog began in 2010: the upgrade of the natural rights construct as our prominent view of our government and politics.  For those new to this blog, let me briefly summarize that view.

The natural rights perspective is a view that places its highest priority on the rights of the individual.  This priority is based on a moral claim that each individual has the right to determine his/her own sense of what is good and evil, what his/her goals in life should be, and that the government is a service agency that exists to meet his/her needs in a competitive arena with other citizens.  The only proviso is that the acts in which one citizen engages do not directly hurt other citizens.  For them, this defines liberty.  In everyday language, it says “I have a right to do what I want to do.”

This view of government and politics replaced in the late 1940s a more communal sense, a federalist sense which places much more emphasis on the communal nature of government and politics.  And here, in this election, we have each of these perspectives being emphasized.  As a matter of fact, this distinction between the two sides is a bit heightened.  It is a distinction in messaging that I, for one, underestimated.  Apparently, as one of the TV pundits, Michael Steele, pointed out, given the economic hardships that many Americans are experiencing, their focus is on their own individual challenges and, in turn, they are looking for a president who is promising to address those needs and wants.  Of course, that refers to Mr. Trump’s message.  On the other hand, we have a candidacy that is promulgating a “stronger together” theme.  The latter message is a more federalist one; it is more communal.  Steele’s point is that the Clinton campaign is at a disadvantage with this message.

I agree.  I generally agree because of this nation’s proclivity to harbor the natural rights construct.  When confronted with federalist ideas and ideals, they react, mostly at a subconscious level, with a sense that what they are hearing is a naïve, soft, unrealistic, and weak position, a position unviable in an atmosphere when voters are confronted by such daunting demands.  This is particularly true in states that were at the core of our manufacturing industry that have lost so many jobs over the last number of decades.  Instead, there is a candidate who in message and in style communicates an image of strength.  That, in a nutshell, is Trump’s advantage especially as it pertains to the swing states, such as Ohio, in the Midwest.

Does that mean Trump is going to win?  No.  There are a lot of factors that go into a campaign.  This is something civics teachers should convey to their students.  One problem we have is that when we are rooting for a particular candidate, we hear what we want to hear, and when the candidate does not win – if that is the case – a sense of cynicism is likely to take hold.  With cynicism, legitimacy issues arise.  In terms of this election, one factor affecting the outcome is most citizens’ sense of what is appropriate behavior and demeanor for an eventual president.  In this, Trump has a disadvantage.  That is but one factor and there are many others.  But I will be interested in how an individualist presentation will do in competition with a more communal presentation.  I will not be surprised if the Clinton side diminishes its communal messaging and hits on another theme.  I remember her husband, in his run for the presidency, early on used the term, “new federalism.”  This was quickly dropped in his campaign.  In any event, Betty Davis’s “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” is an apt sentiment for the upcoming campaign for president.  I hope that whoever wins does so in a way that allows him or her to legitimately govern when the smoke clears.

LET’S GET REAL ABOUT TEACHERS

In a past posting, Mr. Chips Ain’t So Bad (July 10, 2015), I reviewed some commonly voiced complaints against teachers in general.  The attacks, it is understood, are mostly leveled against public school teachers.  In general, my message in that posting is that teachers, as a group of professionals, are not “so bad.”  I want to pick up on that theme in this posting.  If you are interested in this topic, may I suggest you click on that site to review the points my previous posting makes.  As for this posting, I want to revisit the reporting that Dana Goldstein[1] provides.  She tells us that despite the general beliefs many hold as to the unwarranted advantages enjoyed by teachers regarding job security, the facts point to surprising realities.

One, around 50% of new teachers leave teaching within five years.  That is a heck of a turnover.  Goldstein informs us that studies indicate that those who leave teaching in those initial years are not the more successful teachers, but, by and large, are among those who don’t perform as well as those who stay in the profession.

Two, the evidence concerning whether teachers are anymore protected – characterized by low termination rates among teachers exhibiting poor performance – is difficult to find and interpret.  Goldstein cites numbers:  in 2007, teachers being terminated for poor performance amounted to about 2.1 percent among American public school teachers; among workers in companies of over one thousand workers (comparable to the typical school district), the termination rate in 2012 was 2 percent (this includes firings, resignations, and layoffs); and for federal government workers, firings for poor performance account for .02 percent of that workforce.  Therefore, the teacher, as compared with these other two employee populations, are the most apt to be fired for cause.

Three, much of our conversation about teachers and teaching is a bit unrealistic.  The tacit message is often that since what teachers do is so important, they should be as talented as the average doctor or lawyer, yet the resume of most teachers does not compare with that of these other two professions.  They, the teachers, often don’t have the academic credentials that characterize these other professions as measured by college admittance exams – such as SAT scores.  The lack of realism stems from a very important fact – one I have stated several times in this blog:  we need to hire many more teachers than doctors or lawyers.  How many more?  The number is roughly five times greater as compared with each profession.  There are 3.3 million teachers in the US; there are 691,000 doctors, and there are 728,000 attorneys.  Overall, four percent of all civilian workers are teachers.  This math dictates certain rates of availability in terms of talent.  Add to this the perceived inequitable levels of compensation one can expect among teachers, much lower than that for doctors and lawyers.  Teachers do not fare well in those comparisons.  Therefore, the costs to equalize the level of talent among teachers and other professions would be significantly greater than what is currently being spent and success is not guaranteed.

And four, there is little evidence that better resumes result in better teachers.  Yes, nations like Finland have instituted a teacher corps made up of “star” students; that is, they have put in place very high academic standards by which teacher hiring is conducted.  In addition, Finland does have one of the most successful systems among advanced nations.  Yet, in other parts of the world, there are instances where school systems have found ways to develop high teacher performance rates among average talented people.  Cited is the Shanghai system.  Shanghai has dedicated more time toward preparation and training best practices.  This has proven to be effective in producing quality instruction and impressive results in terms of student performance.  As for Finland, there are probably other factors affecting how effective its schools are, not the least a relatively unified approach to education among and within its schools.  So, given the potential costs, lack of any assured results, lack of agreed upon educational strategy, and the numbers of hires needed, we in the US should not hold our breath for significant upgrading in our hiring standards when it comes to recruiting new teachers. Goldstein observes that teaching for the foreseeable future will be made up of average folk.  She cites John Dewey back in 1895:  “Education is, and forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women.”[2]

While in this blog I am seriously critical of our efforts concerning civics education, I do not blame teachers, as a group, for these shortcomings.  As with any profession, there are those who should be doing something else for a living.  This, quite honestly, is going to be an unavoidable factor of life.  Yes, we can improve and we should dedicate reasonable resources to do so.  But teachers, in common parlance, have been overly blamed for our educational problems.  I would point out, with pride, that the reporting of the unfortunate and recurring accounts of tragic shootings and other tragedies from school sites seems to consistently describe the actions of those affected teachers in heroic terms.  The Sandy Hook Elementary School case is prominent in this regard.  When I hear of such cases, a sense of pride overtakes me when I know I was a teacher for most of my professional career.  Believe me, I do not count myself as being capable of such heroism, but to think that those who have behaved in such ways are of my calling provides me with warm feelings that include gratitude.  It is, therefore, with a certain amount of pain that I hear commentary that belittles our teacher corps.  Overall, I believe we should admire these professionals much more than we do and be more supportive of their efforts.

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[1] Goldstein, D.  (2014).  The teacher wars:  A history of America’s most embattled profession.  New York, NY:  Doubleday.

[2] Ibid., p. 9.

A “FIRST” WORTH HAVING?

We were introduced to Melania Trump last night – interesting potential first lady.  She would be a first in many ways.  She would be the first first lady who has posed nude in a national magazine.  It doesn’t make her a bad person; maybe it’s time for such a first.  Her introduction was a bit rocky.  In her speech to the convention, as you probably know by now, she is being accused of plagiarizing from the current first lady, Michelle Obama’s introductory speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.  That’s a first.  Another first is that she would be the first foreign born first lady since Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the US; perhaps this is a needed first.  When I think of Melania Trump, I don’t think first of her speech last night, but of how she is seen in the eyes of the Republican party’s base or part of that base, the religious right.  Why?  Because of what she represents – the urban, secular, sexually liberal view of life.  Whether she, in her personal views and dispositions is really that way is a question worth asking, given how first ladies represent all of us.  Perhaps some of us welcome such a symbolic image of us all, but I am sure this would not be, for many, the first symbol they would choose.  Oh, by the way, a first she is not is Mr. Trump’s first wife.

But there it is.  Let us review a bit of context to this by making a comment or two about religious rhetoric in our political discourse.  In a recent book, Christopher B. Chapp[1] identifies three forms of religious rhetoric:  civil religion, rhetoric emanating from particular religious groups (such as Roman Catholic rhetoric), and civil religious war rhetoric.  The first, expounded upon by Robert N. Bellah, basically refers to the general allusion to religious beliefs that public speakers use, as in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address – “For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.”[2]  This, according to Bellah, is more than mere rhetorical shorthand; it represents an integral moral substance in how Americans generally see the role of religion within the political environment.  How distinguishable and coherent that sense is varies from time to time.  As for rhetoric emanating from a particular religion, this will capture the national attention only when a policy affects a particular religious group or a scandal arises within that group, as with the child abuse by priests scandal that befell the Catholic Church.  The last type, civil war rhetoric, usually concerns the evangelical or fundamentalist groups.  Oftentimes, this type of rhetoric is taken to be an attempt at expanding the numbers of believers, but according to Chapp, most of this rhetoric is dedicated as warnings:  God will seek retribution if we don’t live moral lives (morality defined by these groups’ views of morality).  So, for example, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s was seen by many in the group as God’s wrath for same sex activities.  It is this last sort of rhetoric that pertains to Melania Trump’s background.

If you are instrumental in electing a man who is married to a woman who posed nude for a national magazine, are you inviting further degradation (in the form of legitimizing such a display of salacious material and imagery) and in turn, inviting the Almighty to cast some form of punishment for such an endorsement?  This, logically, would be a question that would occur to individuals who consider themselves evangelicals and/or fundamentalists.  Interestingly, while many of these Republicans did not vote for Trump, I don’t hear this kind of rhetoric from that camp.  But what I am seeing is a clinging effort from those people to fight till the end, if only symbolically, the nomination of Mr. Trump.  I believe that in their minds, this, at a fundamental level, is what is at stake.

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[1] Chapp, C. B.  (2012).  Religious rhetoric and American politics:  The endurance of civil religion in electoral campaigns.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press.

[2] Bellah, R. N. (1967).  Religion in American.  Daedalus, Winter, 96 (1), pp. 1-21, p.1.

FROM A CHALLENGING SETTING, A CHALLENGE

In a recent article that gives an overall account of how effective our current efforts in civics education are, Kathleen Hall Jamieson forms a set of conclusions. These conclusions are:

1) neither the federal government nor the states have made high-quality civics education a priority; 2) social studies textbooks may not adequately convey the knowledge or facilitate the development of the skills required of an informed, engaged citizenry; 3) consequential differences in access and outcomes between upper- and lower-class students persist; 4) cutbacks in funding for schools make implementation of changes in any area of the curriculum difficult; and 5) the polarized political climate increases the likelihood that curricular changes will be cast as advancing a partisan agenda.[1]

I have in this blog discussed many of these states of affairs, but one I have not addressed is number 5, the effect our current polarization has had and which directly draws attention to the challenges of changing our curricular offerings.

Let us say you are a parent, a teacher, a school official, or a national leader who is convinced that our civics offerings have to change.  There are, of course, many political obstacles facing you.  The most obvious obstacle is that those whose power is dependent on the status quo and, therefore, will view any meaningful change as threatening, will likely be against you.  But let us further say that a proposed change becomes popular – oh, perhaps federalist ideals become the “in-thing” – and it is politically advantageous to adopt and attempt to implement the sort of curricular changes that are promoted in this blog.  Does that guarantee a successful change?  No, it does not.

Why not?  The main problem is that what is being proposed includes not only changing textbooks – which, by the way, I don’t suggest doing – but also changing how people basically do their jobs at the school site.  What is being promoted in this blog, can be implemented to varying levels of change.  It could simply mean that teachers consider different concerns when they prepare their lessons.  For the teacher who simply follows the textbook, this level could be challenging.  As I have explained in earlier postings, the prevalent textbooks in the field are based on a natural rights perspective in the content and format they employ.  For the teachers who follow the content, page after page, of the assigned textbook, all of a sudden they are being asked to impose a different perspective on that content.  Whether those professionals are prepared for such a task is more a catch as catch can type of situation.  Some are sophisticated enough; some are not.  Therefore, in-service training, an expensive and time consuming proposition, would have to be part of the change effort.  But further, I would consider that what is being proposed is transformational in nature; that is, it calls on teachers to change not only their objective view of the subject matter, but more likely, a normative shift as well.  This could be assisted by, to the degree it exists, the popular call for such a change.  But popular whims come and go.  Early in my career, I experienced the popular concern over the Soviet threat as spurred on by their launch of Sputnik.  By the time I was teaching, just a few years into that period, the fear of Sputnik had been effectively quieted and with that, all calls for changes in education ceased to be heard.

A heightened level of implementation would call for a school to change how it was run.  A federalist approach to schooling would count on a shared and collaborative approach to organizing, planning, and teaching among teachers, teachers and administrators, and among administrators.  To just comment on one of these collaborative settings, that of teachers, let me report that from my experience, teachers are very much cloistered when it comes to their view of their classroom, not their school.  The classroom is viewed, by most teachers, as their domain.  As such, they are highly sensitive to the, in their eyes, illegitimate meddling by other teachers or abrasive administrators.  I write “abrasive” not due to any personality traits, but by the very nature of what these other people attempt to do.  Therefore, what is needed in order to effectuate the type of change being sought is a change of heart – not just of what is believed to be true, but what is believed and felt should be true.

Now let’s get real.  As Jamieson points out, we are in very divisive times.  I believe that one reason for this condition is our overall view of government and politics, that of the natural rights construct.  This has been explained previously in this blog.  Our current presidential race demonstrates sufficient evidence of this partisan divide which has also characterized our inability to meet many of our national, political needs and demands.  Negotiations and compromise have almost become impossible to achieve even when it is mutually advantageous for all sides to agree.  To agree would hand success to the opposite side and, if one is of the opposition party, would help improve conditions which reflects well on the party in power.  Again, a change that might threaten such partisan environment will not be welcomed and will be judged suspiciously.  It will be evaluated by the standards set by any supportive ideology either side might hold.  Federalist thought will probably be interpreted by the left as a belief system supporting parochial, bigoted life views which it is not.  The right would see it as a challenge to individual prerogatives and heightened governmental intrusions which is true to a limited degree.  As proposed in this blog, the liberated federalism construct – the proposed construct – has been presented as a synthesis between natural rights and critical theory.  As such, there are aspects of this proposed construct that are seen positively by either side of the political divide, but more important in a partisan environment, are seen as antithetical to cherished beliefs.  Consequently, under our current conditions, any attempt to shift our curricular content toward a federated view will be a long one in which careful and prescient planning needs to be done if it is to be successful.

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[1] Jamieson, K. H.  (2013).  The challenges facing civic education.  Daedalus:  Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Spring, 142 (2), pp. 74-75.

INITIAL POWER FACTORS

In the literature of politics, probably the most often cited definition of power is provided by Robert Dahl.[1]  That definition takes the following form:  power is a condition in which one party, person or collective, convinces some other party or parties to do something they would not do otherwise.  This is the definition I have used in this blog.  I have also cited Harold Lasswell’s context for power:  who gets what, when, how, and when.[2]  I have added, with little humor, “and how much.”  Of course, since political science is a social science, one should not confuse this use of the term with how an electrician or a physicist uses it.  They, it turns out, can measure this physical entity; political scientists cannot measure its social counterpart.  Is this important in our attempts to understand politics?  I would say it is.

Power has been considered more or less the central concept in political science.  It’s akin to what the concept, energy, is in physics.  Again, they can measure accurately and precisely their main variable.  Insofar as we cannot in political science or in the study of civics, we are highly limited in our predictive “powers.”  And after all, is it not the main reason for having a science in the first place to be able to predict and, in turn, control?  Perhaps it’s just as well we can’t measure this essential quality of politics.  If it were possible, those who could would have an untold advantage over the rest of us.  Please don’t think that there have not been attempts to measure it; there have, but to no avail.

In this posting, I want to consider some of the conceptual thinking that has gone into this aspect of politics and reported by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.[3]  Starting with the basic structure of Dahl’s definition, he basically explains that the definition is wanting.  It glosses over certain components of a power relation that, it turns out, are essential to delve into in order to understand power’s scope and domain in a given relationship between parties.  By the scope, Nye is referring to the who – the who, who is administering the power (the powerful) and the who, who is the subject of the power exercise.  By the domain, he is pointing to the substantive issues or social/physical conditions over which the exercise of power is performed or attempted.  So, in the obvious case of a government instituting a policy on desegregation in schools, the who is those citizens and school officials who will change their practices in order to comply with the new policy and the domain is the educational practices involved.  But when we look more closely at the scope and domain we find factors, if you will, that are very telling about the situation which not only reveal important social dynamics, but get at what is exactly powerful about what is happening.

Running through this view is the notion that someone with power is able to get what he/she wants by getting others to do things.  But the power lies in the fact that to some degree, the other person(s) are not disposed to do that something.  Here lies the murkiness that prohibits clear measuring.  Simply stated, we don’t know, in a given situation, how disposed a person is.  But that aside, there are other shortcomings.  When a party is getting others to do something, this is done through mechanisms.  The supposed power holder(s) need resources so as to be able to “convince” the subject to be a subject.  In an attempt to simplify this, let me point to three types of motivators that solicit a subject’s compliance.  They are to avoid punishment, to seek reward, or to satisfy an attraction – let’s call these coercive power, reward power, and attraction power.[4]  And in this, we can designate two overall categories of power:  hard power – mostly referring to coercive power which depends on either authority or destructive capacity such as with military resources – and soft power – mostly referring to capacities to change the subject’s mind so that he/she/they want to do the powerful person’s bidding either through rewards or through a sense of righteousness, knowledge, personal, or some other appeal.  In all of this, the subject need not know who is exerting power in order for power to be administered – many times the powerful would rather remain anonymous.  This might assist future exertions of power.  Of course, there can be combinations of these approaches.  The point is, though, that any definition of power should at least allude to these factors; they are that central to the meaning of the term in how it is used in political/civic analysis.

This leads to seeing or defining power from two perspectives.  We can define it in terms of resources or we can define it in terms of behavioral outcomes (what the subject is either expected to do or actually does).  In each perspective, there is a necessary process.  Either resources (e. g., military assets) have to convert into a viable strategy before desired behavioral outcomes are accomplished or the means are chosen by which desired wishes are skillfully accomplished through actions initiated by the powerful.  Actually, in either case we are saying the same thing:  a goal or aim is sought by implementing a course of action that successfully converts desired outcomes into behavioral outcomes.  And this leads to an array of variables (factors) that have to be accounted for in the development of that/those strategies.

That is a topic for another day.  But let’s make a stab at a definition:  power is a social relation in which one party or parties get another party or parties to do something due to some strategy which sufficiently eliminates or diminishes any reluctance by the use of coercive, reward, and/or attraction resources.  While these factors still elude exact measurement, it might lead to better estimations.

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[1] Dahl, R.  (1961).  Who governs:  Democracy and power in an American city.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Lasswell, H. and Kaplan, A.  (1950).  Power and society:  A framework for political inquiry.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[3] Nye, J. S. Jr.  (2011).  The future of power.  New York, NY:  PublicAffairs.

[4] These types are derived from French, J. R. P., Jr. and Raven, B.  (1967).  The bases of power.  In E. P. Hollander and R. G. Hunt (Eds.) Current perspectives in social psychology (pp. 504-512).  New York, NY:  Oxford University Press.  These writers identify five types:  coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert.