A DEFINITIONAL VIEW OF INDIVIDUALISM

 

This blog has dedicated a countless number of words to describe how individualistic the nation has become, especially since World War II.  The overall history of the nation describes the evolution of a fairly individualistic people, maybe because from almost its start, a variety of ethnicities – and hence no overarching cultural dictate[1] – was involved in its formulation.  This diversity has, for example, fueled a successful, individualist-based capitalist economy that has led the world to unprecedented riches.

But this bent, until the great war, was meaningfully contained by certain communitarian biases that served as the foundation for a federalist view of government and politics.  That view emphasizes a recognition that the nation’s constitutions, both at the national and state levels, set forth federated structures among its people.  Yet, as the history of the nation evolved, its people have chosen a more self-centered view of social arrangements.  So, this blog can seriously ask:  what does it mean to say the United States is too individualistic?

The concept, individualism, needs more substance than most people ascribe to it.  Individualism does not make itself known similarly in all situations.  Back in 1985, Bellah, et al. looked at individualism in the American social make-up.  They wrote in Habits of the Heart, “[i]ndividulism is more moderate and orderly than egoism” and proceed to quote Tocqueville:

Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate him[/her]self from the mass of his[/her] fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, with this little society formed to his[/her] taste, he[/she] leaves the greater society to look after itself.[2]

They describe individualism as a habit of thought well ingrained in America’s historical psyche. 

While the mass phenomena to find true self and the extravagance attached to that quest is more recent, Americans are basically a people who see themselves as individuals, as opposed to members of society or community, to rely on the resources for social and personal goals and the source of meaning for those goals.  These cited writers refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson (who wrote an essay entitled “Self-Reliance”), the Puritans, John Winthrop, and Thomas Jefferson as harping on the same theme.

Among the middle class, individualism is highly tied to the work ethic, something firmly felt in America to this day.  “The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a ‘work ethic’ as the meaning of work and ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another.”[3]  Work, which forces the individual to have a public life, has become, due to large-scale industrial (and now postindustrial) operations, segmental and encourages self-interested workers.  By doing so, work has lost a lot of its binding character among the work force.

Individualism can express itself in two modes:  utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism.  Utilitarian individualism tends to be single-minded, and goal driven toward advancing careers.  Expressive individualism values relationships, forms of art, even social improvement goals.  In either form, the writers express concern about the goodness being defined by one feeling good.  “Acts, then, are not right or wrong in themselves, but only because of the results they produce, the good feelings they engender or express.”[4]

They continue that this bias suggests or relies on a moral sense.  It is based on a morality or ethics as being highly subjective; therefore, the distinguishing character of individualism remains ineffable or difficult to describe.

The touchstone of individualistic self-knowledge turns out to be shaky in the end, and its guide to action proves elusive … [T]o what or whom do our ethical and moral standards commit us if they are “quite independent of other people’s standards and agenda?”[5]

          The above concern brings to the fore a battle of priorities.  The battle can be described within the following question:  Is it truer to say societal well-being is produced by assuring individual well-being or is individual well-being produced by assuring societal well-being?  Current schools of thought in psychology generally known as self-actualizing seem committed to the former.

          One of the founding fathers of the self-actualizing school, psychologist Abraham Maslow, using the concept, “synergic” (taken from the anthropologist, Ruth Benedict), assumes that what society can do for the development and well-being of the individual is also good for the development and well-being of the society.[6]

          Bellah, et al, observe:

Our individualistic heritage taught us that there is no such thing as the common good but only the sum of individual goods.  But in our complex, interdependent world, the sum of individual goods, organized only under the tyranny of the market, often produces a common bad that eventually erodes our personal satisfaction as well.[7]

The total level of utility in a society, therefore, can only be enhanced or protected if the commonweal of the entire society is the focus.  Bellah, et al, in Habits of the Heart, identify that the nation is afflicted with a “cancerous” dose of individualism.[8]

          In a later book, The Good Society, these writers pick up on the same theme and further state that to address the disease, social problems should be viewed not from the perspective of the individual, but through the institutions in which the problems are found.  They point out that it is only through institutions that the individual learns to become interdependent with others.  It is not just important what institutions do, but how they do it.  It is through these actions that people coordinate, build social trust, and expand social capital.

          Before leaving the topic for this posting, perhaps a reminder as to the meaning of social capital would be helpful.  According to Robert Putnam, social capital as a societal quality is characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.[9] 

Surely, individualism as described here is more an obstacle to attaining social capital than an asset.  The next posting will look at the theoretical framework this blog will use in the postings to follow – that way, the reader knows what is guiding this blogger.

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[1] This is a qualified claim.  Yes, the early colonial experience was heavily British, but in that, a variety of religious traditions, albeit geographically segregated, found their way to this new land (at least to Europeans).  As the 1600s and then the 1700s progressed, America saw representatives from the array of European cultures make their way over the Atlantic in search of new lives.

[2] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart:  Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, Publishers, 1985), 37.

[3] Ibid., 55-56.

[4] Ibid., 78.

[5] Ibid., 78-79.

[6] George Leonard, “Abraham Maslow and the New Self,” Esquire (December 1, 1983), accessed “gateway” site November 18, 2021, https://classic.esquire.com/article/1983/12/1/abraham-maslow-and-the-new-self .

[7] Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart, 95.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2000).

KEEPING UP WITH “AXIAL” CHANGE

 

This blog, in recent postings, has been citing a string of writers from the waning years of the twentieth century.  This is due to this blogger’s current interest in how federalism and related topics have been considered from roughly that time.  Of great interest, perhaps due to the upcoming “turn of the century,” was the notion of transformation and how the world – especially the advanced nations – was going through meaningful change.  One writer, the world historian, Leften Stavros Stavriano, zeroed in on this theme.

          He hinted that the descriptive term, “axial period,” could possibly be applied to that time and the years to follow into the twenty-first century.  In 1992, he wrote, “As in the original axial age [first millennium B.C.], basics are being challenged – governments, isms, traditions, and leaders.  In the course of today’s axial age, one and all are now on trial.”[1]  Does such a view reflect a “present bias,” one that augments what is happening now?  The belief here is that profound changes are taking place and perhaps what one has been experiencing is just a new normal.

          For example, as the prior postings hint, the nation’s economy is transforming, but American institutions are not functionally transforming with it.  Of course, what is of interest here is the educational institution.  The question is not whether schools are teaching as effectively today as they did earlier – if one can describe American schools as ever being effective – but are they sufficiently effective for the challenges that the future holds?

          In the opinion of many responsible writers, current schools are not meeting these challenges.[2] But, summarily, one can get an overall sense of this state of affairs in the following quote from the Department of Education,

It’s clear what it means to be prepared for tomorrow’s economy.  Already, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require education beyond a high school diploma, with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers prominent on the list.  However, our schools aren’t preparing enough of our students for that reality.  Today, the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world.  Among students who do complete high school and go on to college, nearly half require remedial courses, and nearly half never graduate.[3]

The irony is that to address these globally induced demands, one must look to the nation’s most intimate of settings; one must address the demands of communal institutions such as the family and the local school.

          Prominent in these concerns are the conditions of schools.  The challenges to schools promise to be more demanding under the economic and social realities briefly outlined earlier in this blog.  Whether schools are effective, the gap between how effective they are and how effective they need to be is growing.  To be more effective, schools need to be perceived as more supportive yet demanding places.  In addition, students must perceive that what they are engaged in at school demands a certain level of duty.

          Usually ignored in the discussion of what is happening in schools have been the social contexts in which schools find themselves and the environments they create within their walls.  No longer can schools count on a type of community support that characterized most of their history[4] and the sense of community they enjoyed among the nation’s work force.  While America was not as communal as perhaps other nations, it still enjoyed a far greater sense of community than it does today.  As Christopher Hurn noted toward the end of twentieth century,

 

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, high schools became less solidary institutions capable of inspiring loyalty and commitment.  At the beginning of this period most high schools held weekly assemblies in which all students were expected to be present, maintained large numbers of clubs and voluntary societies that met after school, and celebrated and feted exceptional achievement in award and prize ceremonies.  All these activities helped create a sense that the school was a community to which one owed allegiance rather than simply a place where students came to work … [I]t must be emphasized that there is virtually no research about these trends against which they might be compared, they suggest high schools lost a significant part of their previous ability to sustain a sense of community and shared purpose among their students during the period of declining test scores.[5]

 

To reach meaningful reform, the lack of community life must be addressed.

          It must be addressed both regarding how schools are organized and how they manage their curriculum content relating to social studies, particularly in the teaching of government and politics at both middle and high school levels.  This blog proposes that rebuilding of community life, in some form, is essential to making schools the kind of institution a federalist advocate expects them to be.  In this, this blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation (available through Amazon), offers a how-to presentation by which civics teachers can move to assist in meeting this aim.

          Of course, this concern simply reflects a more general tension Americans face, that being of individualism – especially as touted by the natural rights view – versus community – as touted by federation theory.  The next posting will attempt to answer the question:  what does the statement – the United States is too individualistic – mean?  That posting will add more substance to the concept of individualism.

[Reminder:  The reader is reminded that he/she can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, he/she can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit or click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then look up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] L. S. Stavianos, Lifelines from Our Past:  A New World History (Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 198.

[2] For example, E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (New York, NY:  Vintage, 1987) AND Eric Liu, “What Every American Should Know,” The Atlantic (July 3, 2015), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/what-every-american-should-know/397334/ AND Diane Ravitch, National Standards in American Education:  A Citizen’s Guide (Washington, DC:  Brookings Institution Press, 1995) AND Grace Chen, “10 Major Challenges Facing Public Schools,” Public School Review (November 5, 2020), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/10-major-challenges-facing-public-schools AND Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations:  Preparing Ourselves for the 21^st Century Capitalism (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1992) AND Sydney Johnson, “Robert Reich on Student Brains, Civic and Restoring Pathways to the Middle Class,” EdSurge (August 3, 2018), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-08-03-robert-reich-on-student-brains-civic-education-and-restoring-pathways-to-the-middle-class .

[3] “Progress in Our Schools,” Department of Education (n.d.), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.ed.gov/k-12reforms .

[4] A Pew report shares that while 57% of Americans engage in community programs, only 9% participate in parent engagement activities which consists of school related or youth program activities.  See Aleksandra Sandstrom and Becka A. Alper, “Americans with Higher Education and Income Are More Likely to Be Involved in Community Groups,” Pew Research Center (February 22, 2019), accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/22/americans-with-higher-education-and-income-are-more-likely-to-be-involved-in-community-groups/ .

[5] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling:  An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, 1993), 254-255. 

A POST COLD WAR LANDSCAPE

 

This blog is currently reviewing various problems related to how Americans interact and how, in turn, those social processes reflect the challenges posed by the natural rights perspective.  That view has become dominant among Americans in the way they see governance and politics.  The last two postings have highlighted economic activity and specifically commented on trade and comparative advantage.

          Perhaps history will designate this current time as the post-Cold War era.  To the extent this is true, looking back might be helpful.  In the years leading to the end of the twentieth century, one can detect academic and journalistic commentators who warned of what was developing then and has reached fruition now.  At that earlier time, concerns over various industries were being pointed out. 

As the last posting identified, those were industries in technological space – industries such as microelectronics, biotechnology, tele-communication, and computers plus software.  At the turn of the century, international markets had not experienced the full effect low-income nations would have on those industries.  Today, one is hard pressed to buy a new car since computer chips cannot be sufficiently obtained due to the pandemic and the resulting disruptions of many supply chains that have occurred.  The shortage of computer chips, for example, has had an inordinate effect.

Here is the way the predictions sounded back at the turn of the century:  the major competitors, including those of low wage countries, have yet to see the highest levels of labor competition which seem to be in the future.  As the former communist nations become more capitalistic, their educated work force will enter the global labor market.  “Communism ran bad economies but good school systems.”[1]  Once the former communist world learns to play the capitalist game, employers will have access to a relatively well-educated work force of 1.9 billion people. 

Lester Thurow, who points this out, further writes,

Suppose one gave a comprehensive examination to all high school graduates in America to test their educational qualifications and then gave that same examination to everyone in the old Communist world … How many of the latter world pass the exam with test scores higher than those achieved by the average American high school graduate?  The answer is essentially “infinity” – hundreds of million of people know more than the average American.[2]

In most cases, those educated or trained people excel in the technical areas that promised to be the job producing ones in what was then the future.  And that future is now and the only aspect that didn’t turn out as predicted: the leaders of that eventuality are still under communist rule, that being China and Vietnam.

          The two leading Anglo post-industrial nations, the US and Great Britain, have opted for the individualistic perspective – the natural rights view – in the way they define their competitive institutions.  This perspective has led to strategies that have been shortsighted and geared to maximizing profits.  It has also led to making money the new-fashioned way:  securities trading, leverage buyouts, and stock options.

          An economy so directed is neither creating new wealth to its potential nor increasing productivity.  Early, Germany and Japan adopted more of a communitarian perspective (at that time, Seymour Martin Lipset provided ample statistical evidence for this comparative assertion, particularly in the case of Japan[3]).  What about today?  One way to see how this approach has advanced through the years is to observe how the two nations interact economically today.

          In 2012 the Bertelsmann Foundation conducted a survey of the German population and asked how the people viewed Japan.  They were overwhelmingly positive.  They expressed seeing Japan less as a competitor and more as a partner.  The Japanese reciprocated with their overall positive view of Germany.  The poll, for example, found 97% of the Japanese had a positive view as opposed to 3% who had a negative view.[4]

          Early on, Japan’s government took a much stronger role in coordinating its economic efforts.  Corporations through cross stock ownership arrangements known as Keirstsus[5] in the industrial sector, own 78% of stocks within industrial groups on the Tokyo stock exchange.  These arrangements transcend individual businesses and industries, and, in turn, they advance high efficiencies. 

Today, Japan is the fourth largest economy of the world and Germany ranks third.  These comparisons are tricky.  For example, one can look at wealth per capita – as expressed on the average (the mean) or median – and perhaps get a better sense of which countries and their related approaches do a better job.  But any review seems to bolster the sense that communitarian views fare better in providing more equal but prosperous results.

As for the Keirstsu example, these arrangements have established strong systemic conditions that encourage coordination and lend themselves to a communitarian perspective of shared goals and values.  This should not be an indictment of capitalism, but a “gut-check” to unbridled capitalism as exemplified by policies generally denoted as neoliberal policies which became dominant in the US since the 1980s.[6]

These more communitarian approaches are strong organized conditions that encourage coordination and lend themselves to shared goals and values.  Under a communitarian perspective, the goal is not profit maximization, but market share maximization.[7]  They can be sustained only by populations that share a federated view of their citizenry, i.e., a general sense that that people share a national partnership.

And this leads one’s analysis of the economic landscape to another important factor, the prominence of monolithic corporations.  First, the stage needs to be set.  These entities have acted as the great arbitrators in the economy since their rise in the late 1800s.  They have determined products, wages, and prices.  They maintained a balance which did a good job of keeping the consumer demands of the US reasonably satisfied.

Due to the emerging competition from abroad and the easy access to labor markets, financial resources, transportation facilities, and distribution systems available to any smaller competitors, the pristine perch of the huge corporations no longer exists in many industries.  Perhaps the exception is the social media industry.  Many monoliths have experienced serious downsizing.  According to Robert Reich,[8] in the 1990s, every competitor turned to being leaner if not meaner.  This blog will pick up this turn in the next posting.

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[1] Lester C. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism:  How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World (New York, NY:  William Morrow and Company, Inc.), 45.

[2] Ibid., 46.

[3] Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:  A Double Edged-Sword (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1996).

[4] “Finanzachrichten – Borse and Wirtschaft aktuell,” www.wallstreet-online.de. , attempted to access November 11, 2021.  This is a difficult site to access.

[5] Keirstsu means a business network in Japan that is made up of various companies and organized by supply chains.  The sense is that members are partners, distributors, and at times financiers.  These relations are bolstered by cross ownerships of stock though individual members sustain their independence in their operations.  They, collectively, have been described as “headless combines.”  This blogger thinks they exemplify federated arrangements.  See Daniel Liberto, “Keirstsu,” Investopedia (2021), accessed November 11, 2021. 

[6] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012).

[7] Lester C. Thurow, Head to Head:  The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992).

[8] Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations:  Preparing Ourselves for the 21^st -Century Capitalism (New York, NY:  Vintage Books) AND “Is Lean Manufacturing Still Relevant in 2021and Beyond?”, Four Principles (n.d.), accessed November 11, 2021, https://fourprinciples.com/expert-opinion/is-lean-manufacturing-still-relevant-in-2021-and-beyond/ .

THE COMPETITIVE CHALLENGE

 

The last posting touched upon the stated woes facing many American workers.  The nation’s labor force has experienced many transforming changes since World War II from the rise of foreign trade, automation, and an adoption, domestically, of a natural rights view about what ought to prevail in terms of rights and responsibilities.  This last element affects the social-cultural expectations that Americans hold as they determine how to conduct their social affairs including labor relations.

A review of those changes is useful.  The global framework has drastically changed for the US.  The post-World War II condition was extremely generous to this country.  That war created a level of US superiority in the world never before enjoyed by any other nation in history.  Historically, this was due to the technological advancements caused by the war, the vast destruction suffered by all other industrial countries (except for Canada), and the almost total lack of destruction in the US.

          Consequently, the United States created the rules and conditions of international trade that prevailed in the 1945-1975 period.  The US kept the high technological industries for itself and allowed the rest of the world to fill in the low technological niches.  This distribution was to the benefit of all nations.  The exception to this economic balance was the military expenditures (a public consumption element) of the US (a product of defending against the threat of the Soviet Union) and the unwillingness of Americans to cut private consumption to pay for it.

          This excess, over the years, ate into the investment levels within the US economy and, in turn, the productivity levels of the nation.  The inability of the US to keep up its relative advantage in productivity (even though the US still has the highest productivity levels of the world) and the increasing productivity of such nations as Germany and China, have caused a new competitive world in which vying for the high value market segments in various industries has stiff competitive global markets.

They include specifically seven key industries:  microelectronics, biotechnology, and new materials industries, civilian aviation, tele-communication, robots plus machine tools, and computers plus software (e.g., the production of computer chips).  One report states,

 

The political climates in the United States and Europe show that there are different viewpoints on the results of globalization.  Many countries around the globe are tightening their immigration rules, and it is harder for immigrants to find jobs in new countries.  This rise in nationalism is mainly due to the anger from the perception that foreigners fill domestic jobs [either in their own nations or in the US or Europe] or at companies moving their operations abroad to save money on labor costs.[1]

 

Unlike the period in the post-World War II years, this is a win-lose competition in which an advantage for one country will be a disadvantage to other major competitors.[2]

          Each major competitor comes into the competition with advantages and disadvantages.  In summary, Asian countries (China, Vietnam, and Japan) have the advantage of culturally supporting a productive, as opposed to a consumer, mentality (a factor in those countries that has become more Western since the turn of the century), and a relatively disciplined economic strategy, and Europe has created the largest trading block, giving it the opportunities to highly influence trading rules in the 21^st century.

          The main disadvantages are, for Asian countries, a relative intolerance of foreigners.  That hampers those nations from integrating fully their off-shore economic activities (although China has been very active in various parts of the world).  Germany and other European countries find it difficult to incorporate fully Eastern European nations, control migration patterns (which include influxes from Africa), and its long-standing cultural diversity inhibiting full political unity (of note the departure of Great Britain from the European Common Market).

            As for the US, it still leads the world in all of the economic absolute measures – although one can foresee China eventually taking over that position except for income per capita.  But its weakness is that it has lost ground on many measures and that past successes have made it difficult for its populace to understand the underlying dangers. 

Here lies the area in which American educational practices contribute to a host of challenges the American economy faces in terms of global competition.  As this posting is being written, the US Congress passed an infrastructure law that promises to address many of the elements in which the US has been delinquent in keeping up with its competitors.

          Take for example the trend of real wages (wages that account for inflation).  The Congressional Research Service reports:

Real wages rose at the top of the distribution, whereas wages rose at lower rates or fell at the middle and bottom. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages at the 90th percentile increased over 1979 to 2019 for the workforce as a whole and across sex, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. However, at the 90th percentile, wage growth was much higher for White workers and lower for Black and Hispanic workers. By contrast, middle (50th percentile) and bottom (10th percentile) wages grew to a lesser degree (e.g., women) or declined in real terms (e.g., men).[3]

In short, unless one finds him/herself in the top wage bracket, he/she is more likely to find one’s economic standing more challenging in relative terms.

          Here, the concept of comparative advantage becomes central in many of the calculations affecting international trade.  Comparative advantage relates to how a nation or business can produce goods not in absolute terms – in the cheapest way – but how they can produce goods cheaply relative to the costs to competitors.  In that, those foreign entities have high levels of such advantage.

          Here is how one source describes the importance of comparative advantage:

Comparative advantage has influenced the way economies work from the time that countries first started trading with each other many centuries ago.  Globalization has brought the world together by encouraging more trade among nations, more open financial institutions and a greater flow of investment capital across international borders.  In a globalized economy, countries and businesses are connected in more ways than ever before … Together, these developments improve economic output and opportunities for both developed and developing nations. These factors also cause greater specialization based on comparative advantage …

[C]ountries such as China have seen exponential growth in their manufacturing sectors in recent decades. Countries with the lowest labor costs have a comparative advantage in basic manufacturing. Globalization has benefited developing countries by providing jobs and capital investments that would not have otherwise been available. As a result, some developing countries have been able to progress more quickly in terms of job growth, educational attainment, and infrastructure improvements.[4]

And this sort of backdrop encourages one to be concerned over America’s ability to compete to its fullest capacity in this continuously changing landscape.  Some of these factors have been of concern since the last century, but while some advances have occurred, these factors are still of importance today.  The next posting will continue this review.

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[1] “Globalization Benefits and Challenges,” Velocity Global (October 6, 2021), access November 4, 2021, https://velocityglobal.com/blog/globalization-benefits-and-challenges-gs/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=contact-us&gclid=CjwKCAjwiY6MBhBqEiwARFSCPsSW8zJsRwiKECTu7rZGxsfLc0RqJz-1pXLpcgQ3_zdMik1RoGFamxoCcmEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds .

[2] Today this is pretty much treated as a given in the literature.  For accounts of the transition from a US dominant world economy to a more competitive one, the relevant literature can be found in the 1990s.  For example, Lester C. Thurow, Head to Head:  The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992).  Of course, one can now add China to that list of competitors.

[3] “Real Wage Trends, 1979-2019” (updated 12/28/2020), Congressional Research (no date), https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf .

[4] The Investopedia, “How Does Globalization Impact Comparative Advantage?,” Investopedia (January 18, 2021), accessed November 8, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030215/how-does-globalization-impact-comparative-advantage.asp .

LEADING TO A GLOBAL ARENA

 

In the last posting, this blog outlined some cultural conditions that bode ill for the general health of the US polity and of the nation.  Part of that landscape includes less than optimal conditions in the nation’s schools and those institutional structures that support and give authority to those schools.  That posting claims that in terms of the civic responsibilities of schools, they are not measuring up.

          The noted criticism of American schools has taken many forms, but generally a good deal of literature that generally comments on social maladies has been critical of the lack of educational success.  All the way back to the 1990s, Christopher Hurn puts the source of this criticism into some perspective.

The best known evidence for the claim that high school achievement has declined is the trend of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores.  In the early 1960s those tests were taken by only a very small proportion of high school students, primarily those who were planning to attend highly selective colleges and universities.  As the proportion of students taking these tests has increased, one would expect some decline as the average ability of students taking the test moves closer to the average ability of all high school students.[1]

Hurn goes on to point out that in the twenty or so years before his report, the number of students taking this test has remained basically the same.  That indicates that declines in student performance are difficult to explain.

          He notes that those scores moved unmistakably downward until 1980 and were steady after that year and that these scores are consistent with other testing.  More recently, 2015 saw the lowest scores in some time.[2]  The current state of SAT scores is somewhat mired in issues – such as the use of “adversity scores,” which attempts to take into account socio/economic conditions deemed as negatively affecting student performance.  In addition, the effects surrounding the pandemic have also made interpreting more current scores more difficult.

Overall, though, no one is touting more recent performance in students around the country.  In 2017, a Pew Report judged US schools as woefully below what many believe they should be.  Here are their overall findings,

How do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack and behind students in many other advanced industrial nations.

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries.  The recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38^th out of 71 countries in math and 24^th in science.  Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30^th in math and 19^th in science.

Younger American students fare somewhat better on a similar cross-national assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.  That study, known as TIMSS, has tested students in grades four and eight every four years since 1995.  In the most recent tests, from 2015, 10 countries (out of 48 total) had statistically higher average fourth-grade math scores than the U.S., while 7 countries had higher average science scores.  In the eighth-grade tests, 7 out of 37 countries had statistically higher average math scores than the U.S., and 7 had higher science scores.[3]

 

In short, things, as judged by this blogger, have not improved in the years since the turn of the current century.

          The perception is that schools are not accomplishing their basic function.  Complaints from government, business, and other sectors of society abound.  That environment becomes fertile ground for any uprising in sentiments that might even take bizarre turns as one sees with the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia where critical race theory took center stage.  This has led to a variety of suggestions as to what schools should do.

          Reformers have suggested changes that are usually geared toward curriculum; some suggestions have been adopted, but little has changed in terms of the problems cited.  Among the reports, though, there has been a contradiction of findings as studies are conducted to measure whether such “reforms” as school choice improve educational result, as the sample of the above studies indicates.  And as this recent political season has vividly demonstrated, the politicization of school issues does little to achieve improvements or show the way to a better day.

          It is not the purpose of this blog to settle these debates.  Here, it is sufficient to point out the perceived problem and to speculate that the problem might not lie in whether or not American schools are doing better or worse than schools prior to 1960, but that perhaps schools are not doing a good enough job given the demands of the fast moving – some say, constantly transforming – economy.  To date, those changes that have taken place in the economy have resulted in significant numbers of fellow Americans being displaced in their jobs.[4]

          That is, current indicators point to a continuous situation of competitive realities that threaten the future economic well-being of this nation.  This is unfortunate because the nation has already experienced lowering real wages among the working classes of the nation’s labor pool.  To date, Americans in too high numbers in the general population have not fully appreciated how victimized those segments have been by global forces.

          This blog will pick up this review in the next posting.  The reader, it is hoped, will keep the aim of this review in mind.  That is, given the national shifts and their consequences – such as less concern for inherently local issues including education – one sees an inherent devaluation of federalist ideals.  The next posting will continue describing this deficiency in education and how it affects other concerns, for example, the economy and the availability of employment for American workers.

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[1] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling:  An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, 1993).

[2] Nick Anderson, “SAT Scores at Lowest Level in 10 Years, Fueling Worries about High Schools,” The Washington Post (September 3, 2015).

[3] Drew Desilver, “U.S. Students’ Academic Achievement Still Lags That of Their Peers in Many Other Countries,” Pew Report Center (February 15, 2017), accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ .

[4] This blogger, in his published book, Toward a Federated Nation, dedicates a chapter to the prevailing problem of displaced segments of the labor pool as jobs have been exported to low income labor nations, such as China and Vietnam.  See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020, available through Amazon).