#civics educaiton

[gravitascivics]

VIABILITY OF THE LIBERATED FEDERALISM, II

With the last posting, this blog began a viability statement regarding the construct, liberated federalism.  That construct has been described and explained in a number of postings starting with “From Natural Rights to Liberated Federalism” (June 2, 2023).  Readers are invited to use the archive feature of the blog (via Google:  http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/) and review the postings dedicated to that presentation. 

Using Eugene Meehan’s criteria to evaluate social science constructs, this blog, in the last posting, utilized Meehan’s first criterion, comprehension; this posting will apply his second, control.  By using or implementing control, a reviewer asks:  does a construct control the explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in relationships between and among those parts?

That is, does it have power?  Since this is a proposed adoption of this model, the power level of the model will only become apparent through its use.  The model, as the foundational construct, has to be used in the building of curricular content.  Through that function, teachers and curriculum material designers of American government and civics will determine the effectiveness of this model by measuring the success that resultant materials have in teaching those subject areas.

From a theoretical point of view, the judgment of this synthesis is that it viably presents the factors, roles, and necessary structures that are essential to creating a communal democracy with federalist values.  Further, it claims that these elements can be synthesized into a product that teachers can transmit in practice to the extent that the natural rights perspective and the political systems construct have been able to do and is currently dominant in American schools.

The model is based on the ideas and relationships of such writers as Michael Sandel,[1] Daniel Elazar,[2] and Donald Lutz.[3]  The model also reflects the synthesis of communal, moral theorizing offered by Philip Selznick.[4]  Selznick describes his effort in the following way:

Although this work reflects my experience as a sociologist, I take an ecumenical view of that discipline … “[S]ocial theory,” as used in the subtitle here, includes political, legal, and moral theory.

            Like Emile Durkheim, I believe sociology is preeminently a “moral science” … Of course, many specific studies – many lines of inquiry – are mainly descriptive and explanatory … The closer we come, however, to what is central in the discipline, the more important is evaluation …

            Hence, the distinctive feature of a moral or humanist science is its commitment to normative theory, that is, to theories that evaluate as well as explain.  In political science, constitutional theory is normative or evaluative, in that it speaks to the difference between superior and inferior constitutional systems, which may be strong or weak as ways of achieving the rule of law.  Normative theory is value-centered.  It identifies values, including latent or emergent values, and studies the conditions affecting their fulfillment or frustration … [W]e consider what is genuinely valuable – and affects the fate of values – in the social worlds we study, including our own, whether or not it conforms to our preferences.[5]

In short, the elements of the proposed model, including the interrelationships it indicates, are based on the writings of distinguished experts and their own and reviewed research in the social sciences.

          In addition, the model is not limited to descriptive and explanatory theory, but to normative theory as well.  The needs of students – young citizens – being introduced to the structures, processes, and functions of government are more demanding than a neutral descriptive account can provide.  The application of moral standards to authority, the same source from which they receive the rules, regulations, and laws these youths are expected to obey, is inevitable.

          Whether the standards are based on short term consideration or longer-term ones are dependent on socializing agents.  Communitarian agents are what encourage longer term perspectives and permit political perspectives that are less conflictual and, according to Selznick, based on consensus.  But one should keep in mind that conflict will always be an element of political life and the liberated federalist model does not short-change that reality.

          And to see beyond that reality, to see beyond a political context in which the individual is scheming to attain the marginal advantage, the person must be socialized to standards which promote “a healthy social environment [where] this separateness [of the individual] is mitigated and obscured.”[6]

          And this posting leaves readers with the parting Selznick quote,

Nothing, I say, can be desired by men more excellent for their self-preservation than that all with all should so agree that they compose the minds of all into one mind, and the bodies of all one body, and all endeavour at the same time as much as possible to preserve their being, and all seek at the same time what is useful to them all as a body.  From which it follows that men who are governed by reason … desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind, and therefore they are just, faithful, and honourable.[7]

In an ideal frame of mind, nothing could be more powerful and possible than these claims by Selznick.

          Next, this blog will address precision.

[1] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism:  A View from the States (New York, NY:  Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966 AND “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33 (Spring), 231-254.

[3] Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

[4] Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth:  Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1992).

[5] Ibid., xii-xiii.

[6] Ibid., 208.

[7] Ibid., 209.

[gravitascivics]

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, IV

[Note: This posting is subject to further editing.]

An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation[1] …

This blog has been reviewing the main elements of critical theory.  It has done that by tracing, in a summary fashion, the history of the Frankfurt School, an academic group of scholars.  They were/are concerned with the levels of subjugation that they judge afflict nation-states.  The last posting left readers with how this group, coming into the current era, was dealing with various contradictions – this posting addresses them.

         One glaring contradiction is a general support of natural rights’ promotion of individual rights (liberal democracy) but at the same time, as described earlier in this blog, they, critical theorists, attack it as contributing to the subjugation of oppressed people (those of lower income and/or victims of prejudice).

The hitch over this inconsistency centers on how liberal democracy has been wedded to capitalism.  By approaching the ideals of laissez faire economics – the purest approach to capitalism – resulting realities indicate, in recurring fashion, that certain developments take hold.  One is that through the competitive process, certain players will be more successful than others and proceed to eliminate the less profitable competitors or otherwise consolidate them.  

In either case, a concentrated market with fewer competitors comes about.  This further results in higher prices and lower wages. The relative, political standing of workers vs. entrepreneurs drastically shifts to the entrepreneurs and results in sub subsistence wages and other subjugating realities develop. This narrative reflects Marxist thought and has been further developed by Frankfurt scholars from Marcuse to Adorno and Horkheimer.  

More recently Habermas, in one his initial books, takes up this argument by claiming that public opinion – the foundation of democratic rule – is less a causal factor – as in majority rule – in determining governmental policy and more of a manipulated factor as a result of political and market research.  Taking account of how people feel about commercial products or political positioning can be subject to the same motivating factors. Brand X can refer to a soap product or a politician or governmental program – sell, sell, sell.

Clashing in this bifurcation between being supportive of democratic liberalism and critiquing it is competing views of democracy among these scholars.  In one view, people react to common issues or challenges, consider optional policy reactions, debate, compromise, and come to some level of consensus as to what to do.  

As for the other view of democracy, people view it as subject matter needing to be studied. How? Using positivist protocols where citizens’ actions serve as a dependent variables and subject to influences by independent variables, in which both can be observed, measured, analyzed, theorized, and targeted for predictive conclusion.  How will citizens act or how can they be effectively shepherd to act become central concerns.

It is from the first sense that civics has traditionally taught governance and politics to secondary students.  The second sense is what is taught at the college level, and then further explained at the graduate level.  The first sense reminds one of town meetings or local debates over policy.  The second engenders images of technocratic political manipulations of consumer-oriented citizens.

Picking up the development of the common political environment of the late twentieth century, the last posting pointed out that, first, the anti-war movement influenced the politics of Europe and the US during the 1960s.  This was followed by the counter-culture – hippie – phase.  The whole experience with the counterculture, how it started, grew, and eventually came to an end, pointed out – to those who could be more objective – how critical theory fell amiss of practical concerns and practical politics.  

This impracticality, to a degree, was noted as being purposeful and unapologetic since even practicality was considered too institutionally based to be much of a substantive resource.  As a matter of fact, ongoing developments continued to be more strident as the more ardent expounders of critical thought began engaging in higher levels of hostile activities.  Again, this occurred in Europe and in the US.  

For example, active (verging on violent) protests by students against parliamentary policy decisions in West Germany took place, the activities of Green Party members are noted, and activities of radicals within established political parties such as British Labour Party also occurred.  But that phase lasted for about a decade and popular opinion drifted from the more intense feelings of the radical branch of critical theory advocates.

More recent, and here what follows relies on this writer’s experience with academia, one doesn’t find the energy among critically minded advocates one found in the sixties and seventies.  Yes, there are exceptions, but not found generally.  Consequently, this blogger does not detect that among the academics themselves, within their scholarly work, engaging in such protesting behaviors.

Instead, their participation seems more restrained to their academic research and writings.  They seem, though, to have captured the central interest and concern of those who determine in which directions professional efforts will proceed – the vast majority of research reported in the socially relevant journals reflects this current dominance.

To support this claim, this writer in his book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics, offers a random selection of article titles from the leading political science journal, the American Political Science Review.  From their respective tables of content, he shares the titles from an issue in 1958 and from 2021.  Comparing them, one can easily detect the dominance of critical theory themes in the more recent selections.[2]

Yet, other forces are at play in affecting how scholarship will proceed.  From funding sources – both public and private – that pay the bills at universities and colleges, one finds meaningful reactions to this tilting to the left.  Here are Brian Milstein’s observations:

 I do believe that contemporary critical theory has the capacity to … contribute powerful insights in how to confront [subjugating realities]. But there is one area about which I’m less sanguine.

…

[I]f there is one further area that stands in urgent need of critical theory’s attention, it is the academy itself. Many of critical theory’s successes over the past several decades have been in challenging various academic discourses with regard to their unacknowledged presumptions and hidden biases. But little critical-theoretic attention is paid today to the broader social-institutional complex in which theory is generated, including critical theory. As critical theorists who are (or aspire to be) working scholars, we remain at the end of the day participants in a social division of labor. Universities in the U.S. and U.K., for example, are changing rapidly, with politicians and segments of the public demanding trimmed-down curricula focused on technological development and vocational training. If the production of theory plays a role in the reproduction of the societies in which we live, then we need to examine how the rise of the ‘corporate university’, the precarization of academic labor, the increasing subjection of scholarly work to administrative surveillance, and incentive structures that emphasize metrics such as impact factors may come to alter the way theory is produced in the future. If there were ever a question on which we need to think of ourselves as not only observers of society but also participants, this is surely one.[3]

 While this seemly growing conflict between scholarly concerns and administrative overview of what scholars are producing – where the news is picking up some of its public demonstrations especially with the actions of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida – public reaction will be interesting to follow.  

The outcome might very well determine if critical theory will have any influence at displacing natural rights as the dominant construct.  If it can, that will not only affect civics education but how Americans see governance and politics in the upcoming decades.  In any event, this account will now, starting with the next posting, address more directly how critical theory can and has affected education.  To do so, the attention of this blog will be drawn to a South American country.

[1] These postings that convey the basic information regarding critical theory heavily depends on the overview provided by William Outhwaite.  See William Outhwaite, “Critical Theory,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell Publishers, Ltd), 106-109.

[2] Here are those article titles:

List 1:  American Political Science Review, 52, 2 (June 1958, complete listing) -- The Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions: The Use and Abuse of Quantitative Methods / Reply to Fisher's Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions / The Paradox of Voting and Congressional Rules for Voting on Amendments, Components of Electoral Decision / The Paradox of Voting and Congressional Rules for Voting on Amendments / Components of Electoral Decision / President-Cabinet Relations: A Pattern and a Case Study / Political Representation in Metropolitan Areas, Political Representation in Metropolitan Areas / Power, Principle, and the Doctrine of the Mouvement  Republicain Populaire / The Viet Nam Constitution of 1956 / A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model / Bacon's Imperialism, Critical Note: Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law

List 2: American Political Science Review, 115, 2 (May 2021, since actual list has 15 entries, to keep it to reasonable length, this listing includes every other title) – To Emerge? Breadwining, Motherhood, and Women's Decisions to Run for Office / Universal Suffrage as Decolonization / When Are Legislators Responsive to Ethnic Minorities? Testing the Role of Electoral Incentives and Candidate Selection for Mitigating Ethnocentric Responsiveness / Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy, Triggering Ideological Thinking: How Elections Foster Coherence of Welfare State Attitudes  / Four Costly Signaling Mechanisms / Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in American South / Control without Confirmation: The Politics of Vacancies in Presidential Appointments / Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and Coherent Aggregation / The Political Economy of Governance Quality / Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana / Do Commodity Price Shocks Cause Armed Conflict? A Meta-Analysis of Natural Experiments / When the Money Stops: Fluctuations in Financial Remittances and Incumbent Approval in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia - Corrigendum

The judgement here is that the second set of titles amply represent critical theory themes, where the first reflects positivist themes for the most part.  For complete listing see Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics: Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022), 359-360 or online, look up the respective citing for each issue of American Political Science Review.

[3] Brian Milstein (political theorist at the University of Limerick), “What Is Critical Theory Today? (And What Is It For?), No date, accessed March 22, 2023, https://www.google.com/search?q=brian+milstein&rlz=1C1RXMK_enUS966US966&oq=Brian+Milstein&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j0i22i30l3j69i60.4223j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

[gravitascivics]

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, III

An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting will continue this blog’s review of the natural rights perspective as if from one who advocates it. And in its review of how the perspective would portray a civics subject matter, this posting begins to cast its focus on the academic study of politics.

Discipline of Political Science

         The emphasis on the individual, as expressed in this blog’s definition of the natural rights view, is reflected in the movement within the discipline of political science since the mid-twentieth century. Political studies became a more separate study, defining itself as more of a science in the Baconian sense as it pursued behavioral questions.

         Political behavior became the discipline’s object of interest.  Toward the end of the century, this perspective had a broadening turn to look at the processes of decision-making and the impact of values and qualitative judgments.[2]  A short descriptive history of this development provides insight into how the discipline influenced what is being taught in secondary schools today.

         Under the natural rights moral perspective, governmental or collective actions are seen as legitimate only when they pursue outcomes where individual efforts cannot meet the requirements facing a group or community.  As Michael Sandel points out, it is a view of governmental action that takes on a consumer perspective.[3]  Also, Robert Dahl wrote some years ago, “a political system is any persistent pattern of human relationships that involve, to any significant extent, power, rule or authority.”[4]

         Led by David Easton[5] and his development of systems analysis, the discipline began to analyze political processes, in behavioral terms.  Systems theory became the prominent perspective in that discipline, first in the 1950s and 1960s as a heavily behavioral movement and then in the 1970s and 1980s as what Easton called a post-behavioral revolution[6] or, as this blogger would argue, opened the discipline to those issues that are vibrant at a given time – an even more market orientation.

         The former period attempted to apply research techniques and theory building processes of the natural sciences.  The latter “revolution” was to apply those techniques and to incorporate, in their analysis, societal problems which were political in nature.[7]  Easton writes of this development,

 Unlike the great traditional theories of past political thought, new theory tends to be analytic, not substantive, general rather than particular and explanatory rather than ethical. That portion of political research which shares these commitments to both the new theory and the technical means of analysis and verification thereby links political science to broader behavioral tendencies in the social sciences and, hence, its description as political behavior.  This is the full meaning and significance of the behavioral approach in political science today.[8]

           Whether used as the highly scientific mode or under a perspective which emphasized the political and social issues of a period, the systems approach has been a more behaviorally based mode of analysis as compared to that used by traditional political scientists.  Whatever the emphasis in the discipline, American social studies teachers have taken a systems approach, one that is bent toward a structural-functional form of analysis.

         One can detect this approach by simply reviewing the textbooks that public schools utilize in teaching civics at the middle-school level, or American government at the high school level.  This blogger, in his book From Immaturity to Polarized Politics,[9] provides an evaluative review of the two leading high school textbooks that demonstrate this attachment to the systems approach.

He agrees with William Callahan, who in 1990 observed, “Traditionally … civics courses in American schools have been more narrowly defined. They have focused almost exclusively on the structure and function of government, particularly at the federal level.”[10]  That judgment still holds today in American classrooms.  And by doing so, those courses offer secondary students the opportunity to acquire the information they need to compete in that “market” known as governance.  

No, people don’t directly use money in this market – although money plays a role – instead, one uses the currency of power.  That is, those structures and functions with their accompanying processes that are highlighted in secondary courses have to do with power.  More directly, that means the main attention falls on how individuals and groups influence one another.  Power is defined as the ability to make binding or authoritative decisions over how to allocate values.

Influence is defined as having the ability to steer, to some degree, those decisions in a manner seen as beneficial by individuals or groups exerting this ability.  In essence it is that ability to get someone or group to do something that person or group would not do otherwise.[11]  These activities – as they become of interest to civics instruction – are conducted in the context of a system, a conglomeration of parts (in the form of offices, agencies, and their personnel) that, to some minimal degree, are organized and interactive.

The political system is characterized by people holding and espousing competing political values.  Each party has the right to participate (each is equal before the laws that govern this process).  These competing values, in turn, seek to prevail in the form of policies and advancing social, economic, and political interests.

Most of the time, but not necessarily, values are exclusive of one another so that not all can be satisfied (usually due to limited resources). The main function of the political system, therefore, is to make the decisions that resolve the differences between or among these values and preferences and their respective parties.[12]

And with that overall view, this posting will end.  Given this last descriptive element, hopefully it gives readers a good sense of how the application of a market model is justified. The next posting will further this introduction of the natural rights view and its political systems approach to the study of political science about how that view has affected civics education.

[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Stephen L. Schechter and Jonathan S. Weil, “Studying and Teaching Political Science, in Teaching the Social Sciences and History in Secondary Schools:  A Methods Book, edited by James C. Schott and Laurel R. Singleton (Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996), 137-170 AND for a more detailed review of this history see Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022), especially its Appendix Chapter.

[3] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) AND one detects this bias or view – a view that casts citizens as “customers” – mostly by the language used to describe governmental delivery of services, e.g., see “Customer Experience,” Partnership for Public Service (November 2021), accessed August 7, 2022, https://ourpublicservice.org/our-solutions/customer-experience/.

[4] Robert Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1970), 6.

[5] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).

[6] John G. Gunnell, “Political Theory and Political Science,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell, 1987), 386-390.

[7] Of more recent development is the adoption of critical theory by many, if not most, political scientists (and other social scientists).  Generally, the theory applies broad Marxian ideas and ideals to the study of social phenomena.  

Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies.

See “Critical Theory,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (March 8, 2005), accessed August 8, 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/.

[8] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of “Behavioralism,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY: The Free Press 1967), 11-31, 31.

[9] Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics.  Available through Amazon.

[10] William T. Callahan, Jr. “Introduction,” in Citizenship for the 21st Century, edited by William T. Callahan and Ronald A. Banaszak (Bloomington, IN:  Social Studies Development Center, 1990), 2.

[11] Robert Dahl, Who Governs:  Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1961).

[12] Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life.

[gravitascivics]

PARTISAN INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM, PART II

The last posting introduced the reader to what a team of Pew Research Center researchers found concerning the 2016 election.[1]  Specifically, they discovered that two dynamics were very instrumental in the results of that election.  The first being the result of a book, Clinton Cash.  That book made a series of claims about how Hillary and Bill Clinton, through donations to their foundation and speaker fees, garnered extensive payments augmenting their wealth to $130 million.

         Through certain timings, the implications, without proof, was that Mrs. Clinton was guilty of favoritism and even acceptance of bribes for favorable decisions for moneyed interests while she was secretary of state.  The overall aim was to establish a public agenda that undid Clinton’s campaign to win the White House.  What was of note, this effort began before Trump became the Republican candidate – he simply benefited – and introduced the American public to the right-wing information ecosystem that spread the anti-Clinton message.

         The second dynamic centers on the disinformation the right-wing ecosystem spread through their propaganda.  That effort zeroed in on misleading political messaging with the intent to affect the attitudes and beliefs of targeted segments of the electorate.  Further, as part of that messaging, these operatives seemed to discourage critical reflection over the policies and political choices confronting their interests.  And here their tactics had become quite sophisticated.

Using psychological elements of memory and belief structures with the utilization of online, interlinked sites, the designers were able to have their viewers accept a version of the truth.   That is, by applying repetition and familiarity techniques, that affect what people remember and hold as true, these propagandists met with significant success as they directed and implied renditions of political claims beneficial to their political goals.    

Their strategy, more specifically, was to develop a presentation of their “facts” to an array of media outlets.  Through these efforts and the use of memes (cultural messaging that usually use humor or other attention-grabbing techniques that play on cultural symbols), the designers produced a series of mutually reinforcing images that portrayed Clinton in certain lights.  

For example, she was seen as friendly with Arabs by citing specific incidents within highlighted countries irrespective of the substance of such examples.  In one case she was seen mingling with Moroccans, a people that the US has a very positive relationship but of which Americans in general have little knowledge. The image portrayed is she is friendly with Muslims, a group, common lore identifies as problematic to American interests.

From these images, the designers concocted stories that evolved into folklore which reinforced in-group/out-group tensions among those who viewed the messaging.  And this messaging did not end with the election of Trump but intensified afterward. The aim then was not so much to garner votes but to ward off ill effects of the various scandals that have surrounded the President through the years of his term in office.

How should these efforts be addressed?

The challenge in combating this second dynamic, too, is that there are no easy fixes. If indeed Russia played a significant role in waging a propaganda war, certainly efforts to identify these interventions and expose them in real time are important. To the extent that political clickbait can be shown to have had a measurable influence on beliefs, countermeasures by the leading platforms, Facebook and Google, may help. But if the fundamental challenge comes from inside the political system and consists of political communication within a major wing of the American political system, the solution is far from obvious.[2]

         Again, as with the first dynamic, any efforts to reign in (through regulations) these practices – assuming one thinks they should be – meet with the rights guarantees of the First Amendment.  Yet in the eyes of many, especially if one can establish a role by a foreign – and in this case hostile – government, people can define this dynamic as a genuine threat to the nation’s democratic standing in its government and politics.

         The Pew researchers suggest that solutions need to originate from within the nation’s political system.  And here, ironically, American conservatives – those put off by what has happened to the Republican Party under Trump – play a pivotal role albeit a difficult one.  That role is to communicate a counter message in conservative speak to questioning conservatives.  The current campaign season has seen that strategy through the messaging of the Lincoln Project.

         Another necessary type of player is news people.  Journalists that ply their trade in venues that are seen and listened to by “crossover” voters – those not committed to one party but venture back and forth – can provide accurate information that can dispel misleading information or information that is not true.  In addition, these reporters need to be on guard against purposeful information meant to mislead them which has happened on various occasions.

         But fundamentally, one needs to find a workable solution in the very politics of the nation.  That is, if this sort of extreme messaging continues to be effective, i.e., they win elections and provide monetary rewards to the networks that give it space, these practices will continue.  And here, the Pew report states, “While the ecosystem around Breitbart and other right-wing outlets constitutes a tightly insulated echo chamber, this isolated conversation proved immensely powerful in setting the broader agenda of the 2016 president campaign.”[3]  The Pew researchers cast this insight as a paradox.

         That is, it is a paradox in that this echo chamber permits an ongoing re-circulation of ideas and those ideas continue to work their way into the broader media outlets.  They go way beyond Breitbart consumers.  It was this spread that led, among other causes, to the election of Trump.  Without it, Trump would not have won the electoral college vote.  This spread of the Breitbart message, beyond righ-twing circles, set the anti-Clinton image broadly and repeatedly across the media landscape.  Her scandals became item one in what was mentioned and over what was commented in mainstream media outlets.

         And so, a meaningful address of this “problem” of misinformation needs to be centered on the employed strategies of those who practice it.  What are they; how do they gain traction; and how can one effectively counter their effects?  This needs to be a holistic view of the media world in all its complex aspects.

[1] Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Library (n.d.), accessed August 19, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76a9/3eb0bed8ff032c44186678c5279f20cc5ff8.pdf?_ga=2.230250332.1151241653.1597869609-1463880478.1597869609 .

[2] Ibid., 130-131.

[3] Ibid., 132.

[gravitascivics]

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART III

The last posting gives the reader a ranging view of how Americans have developed in terms of their philosophical ideas.  Just stating that, it sounds pompous to American ears.  And the fact that it does brings one back to Allen C. Guelzo’s[1] claim as to the pragmatic bias this nation has exhibited for being doers not thinkers.  And yet the academic history of the nation stretches back almost to its very beginning.

         And for this, one can cite the founding of Harvard just six years after the settlement of Boston in 1630.  One can further credit the religious enterprise, in this case that of the Puritans, to seek answers to the more metaphysical questions of life.  While this tradition is noted today for its very strict, moralistic theology, it attempted to discover reality that is not readily observable in the material world.

Now all of this development was a complex mix of views and biases; for example, thrown into this was the common-sense philosophy of Scottish thought in the eighteenth century (more on this below).  But central in the beginning there was Puritanism that along with its fire-and-brimstone sermons was a strong commitment to congregational arrangements and their covenantal origins.

         Puritanism represents the stoic side of American thinking and one name that emerges as one studies these various influences is that of Jonathan Edwards who was a leader of the Great Awakening, a reemergence of Puritanical allegiance that was reestablished in the mid to late 1700s.  That movement was a sincere effort to bolster Puritanical morals after some slippage due to initial successes in the colonial settlements.

This is not to claim this historical figure was some great thinker, but a thinker he was and was later designated as president of Princeton (he died as he was about to assume that office in 1758).  But even in the midst of the Great Awakening, the practical side of American thought did not go away.

         On the other side of this dual personality, the next contributor, one that overlaps in time with Edwards and his ilk, is Benjamin Franklin who published his Poor Richards Almanac in 1732 and his Autobiography in 1791 (he died in 1790).  Here one finds the practical tradition of Americans being extolled.  Uplifted were qualities of business acumen and common sense.  And in addition, as alluded to above, was the Scottish philosophic bent of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and others who if not affecting Franklin, did have an effect on Thomas Jefferson.

Reid wrote the following:

Man was destined for society.  His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.  He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the kalon, truth, etc., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.  It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this; even a less one than what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[2]

This statement gives more philosophical language to the very down-to-earth perspective that was common among Americans not only of those days but throughout the nation’s history.  

And this sort of leaning can readily be seen as feeding another movement that would turn out to have a profound influence that this blog highlighted in its last posting.  That is the movement known as Transcendentalism.  And these lesser religious notions or themes are picked up through the 1800s and one can cite the fictional works of Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).  Their novels directly attack the Puritanical thinking that was judged in these works to be too inhuman in its expectations.

         One can than trace this other tradition to the development, years later, of Pragmaticism and the works of William James and John Dewey.  And that brings a student of this tradition into the twentieth century – Dewey died in 1952.  But how philosophical was this tradition and, for that matter, the Puritanical tradition? Admittedly, not very.  Even the more well thought out tradition of Pragmaticism could boast of only a relatively few top-notch thinkers such as Dewey and James.[3]  But then again, its emphasis, even as a philosophy, was on doing, not thinking.

         And perhaps this lack of theorizing helped those who opposed these voices influenced by the Enlightenment.  Inspired by the Great Awakening in an around about way, and the work of Edwards, was the influence exerted by the Romantics.  While this Romanticism, as expressed in Transcendentalism, was mostly anti-religious, it was pro sentiment and emotion and reactive against pure reason and objectivism – and as such was a mixture of anti-religious dogma, but pro-religious fervor.

Antagonistic to the ideas emanating from science, from Descartes to Newton, these religiously inspired ideas and emotions became part of the American story.  In more current days, the remnants of the Romantics can be found in Born Again messaging that one can find among Evangelicals of today.  Heavily reliant on the Bible, its literal interpretation of that book provides much of what its adherents consider truthful accounts of the physical world.  

And why are these views taken as truth?  Because it feels true.  Passion, not reason, for Romantics is the essential guide.  And here, even Transcendentalism can be viewed not as a movement toward reason, but toward emotionalism, at least as it is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  All this will be described and explained in later postings.  Links to such characters as John C. Calhoun and his representation of southern agrarianism will be pointed out.  Here, the aim is to give the reader the warning that all of this, while it can be analyzed and of which sense can be made, is not an account of a single-minded people.

One can detect the two traditions, Puritanism and the Enlightenment. How both affect Transcendentalism and its effects, given Santayana’s overview (see previous posting), all of these combined and co-existed under an organizational and political arrangement defined by federalist principles.  

Organizational principles are not handed down from above.  They instead have to stand free with enough supportive ideals and ideas which have to be thought of, implemented, and defended to survive various challenges such as those facing the Civil War generation, and many think, the present generation.

They are the product of the human mind and are implemented through complex mixtures as those found in this nation’s past.  More will be shared in upcoming postings including a more detailed accounts of what this and the last two postings introduce and describe to the reader.  

[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005). Unless otherwise indicated, factual information found in this posting is derived from this source.

[2] As quoted in Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018), 202-203.  This quotation was utilized in a previous posting.

[3] This claim is belied by Louis Menand’s account of Pragmaticism.  See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

[gravitascivics]

ULTIMATE GOALS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

This posting continues a look at school reformers of the 1840s and beyond in the nineteenth century.  The purpose of this visit is to ask how parochial/traditional views over citizenship and education developed in America’s past.  The aim is to test the claim that that construct held dominance during the nation’s past from colonial years to the years just after World War II. And if true, how did Americans experience that dominance?

         The last two postings gave the reader an introduction to the works of Horace Mann and Catherine Beecher. Mann is noted for starting the nation’s first statewide educational system in Massachusetts and Beecher was a pioneer in promoting women in the teaching profession including her efforts in recruiting and training women to go out west and teach in frontier schools. Both dealt with the strict tradition of Puritanical thought and its effect on how schooling was conducted.

         Generally, they worked toward bending the prevalent religious influence toward more secular leanings.  Specifically, they favored curricular content that emphasized communal deeds instead of instilling Protestant doctrine.  They

… tended to see schools as secular churches:  community centers where any child could be improved – even religiously “saved” – through education.  [They] believed it was more important to teach a child good deeds than good doctrine; to focus less on the details of literature or mathematics than to create faithful, decent, socially adept young men and women – people who could resist the mob rule of the French Revolution and the Ursuline convent arson.[1]

And women doing this work equated to missionary work of priest and monks and should be rewarded with social rewards over money or political power.

         But among the consequences of such a policy, a pedagogic calling suffered in that it began being viewed as a philanthropic pursuit instead of a professional career.  This led to issues in education.  They included:  as moral agents did this view of teachers interfere with the role of parents? And, if based on Protestant views of morality, how were other religious traditions to be treated or respected? This was particularly true concerning Catholics and Jews.

         A chief critic of these developments was a contemporary journalist, Orestes Brownson.  He complained of this religious bias toward WASP beliefs.  This converted Catholic also saw Mann’s deprioritizing of academic curricula to a more communal emphasis as impractical when it came to the interests of the working class. They needed, in his eyes, vocational training and should be informed of labor rights.

         For good or ill, Mann and Beecher’s bias prevailed across the nation’s public schools.  That is, American education took on this more communal, faith-based education over academic rigor.  This writer, a product of 1950s-1960s Catholic parochial schools, can recall what he was led to believe:  that public schools just did not measure up academically to Catholic schools.

And he was exposed to the difference upon being moved from New York City to Miami, Florida back in 1958 and having to go to a public school for two and half months.  This was in the fourth grade and he found himself changing from being a failing student to being one of the brightest kids in the class.  His new classmates were being taught material that he had been exposed to years earlier especially in math.  He loved his new situation but was moved back to a Catholic school as the new school year started in the fall. Oh well!

The question he asks today is, why this dichotomy?  Can one be taught and encouraged to be communal and academic at the same time?  Better still, can one use academics to advance communal learning?  Of course, this blog maintains that one can and one should see learning and education in these terms.

[1] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 30.  The historical information in this posting is drawn from this source. The arson reference is a fire Mann had to investigate earlier in his career.  The fire burnt down a Catholic convent.

[gravitascivics]

GROWING DISTINCTIONS

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

When one looks at American political parties and their role in promoting or handling polarized politics, one sees that the Republican Party has experienced meaningful changes in the last decade or so.  Until recently, that party has engaged in rhetoric that utilized coded language to promote policies that favored Anglo identity people – the white majority – at the expense of minority groups.  

It was not necessarily motivated by racist or otherwise bigoted motives.  It instead, to win elections, had to find a way to garner votes when its basic policy positions were formulated to represent a relatively small number of voters.  Until recently, its positioning reflected the economic interests of a minority, businesspeople.  

That minority – especially in the form of larger corporate personnel who shy away from forming alliances with others – hold political aims that run counter to the interest of the larger populated block of potential voters, the working classes. Whereas there are many more working-class voters then there are businesspeople, those business entities had to conger up issues and accompanying messaging that would cut into those working groups’ support and shift their political allegiance to the Republican Party.  

Identity politics fits that bill.  This process, in effect, was an incubating problem in that under this facade many working class issues went unaddressed by Republican led legislative efforts.  But given the recent developments, those “hidden” messages and their accompanying policies have erupted into the open.

Certain events have served to “out” them, not to lead workers to see the duplicity of Republican policy, but to unmask the racist and xenophobic character of their positioning.  Putting immigrant children in cages, the death of African Americans at the hands of police, and the growing frustrations at the loss of jobs to foreign countries – usually inhabited by people of another race – as well as other developments have brought matters to a boil.  And then there was Trump.  He used the politics of identity to form his base.  And, in turn, he, unintentionally, has also developed his counter base.

In doing so, Trump has gained effective control, at least at the national level, of the Republican Party.  The Democratic Party has evolved into that counter base.  The level of animosity between the two camps has reached dangerous levels.  Where this might end, at the time of this writing, is unknown.  One hears of outrageous possibilities, recently even the possibility of Martial Law was thrown out in the public arena as a way to undo the 2020 presidential election.  January 20th cannot get here fast enough.

And this leads one to take a close look at how the major parties are constituted in terms of their respective constituencies.  In general, the Republican Party has a far more unified set of supporters while the Democrats can boast a far-ranging array of groups that make up its supporters.  For each, its situations, while different, does have its own set of challenges standing in the way of each party coalescing its voters so as to win elections.

Republicans do attempt to attract followers among businesspeople and the more fundamentalist religious groups.  Both these constituent groups tend to be populated by whites and support conservative policy choices.  That is there is a good deal of overlap between these two groups and, therefore, allows the party to design a fairly unified ideological message.  And, as a result, can go “deep” within its rhetoric to describe and explain what it proposes in a given campaign.

This is not the case with the Democratic Party.  Its supporters range from urban, liberal voters to fairly conservative minority people who have strong religious beliefs.  Prominent in this religious block of supporters are blacks and Latinos/as. These latter groups cringe at Democratic positions on social issues – e.g., their pro-choice position – but can’t abide by Republican’s anti civil rights proposals.  Consequently, while Republicans tend to be ideological, Democrats tend to be practical in both their policies and rhetoric.

This leads to various differences in the respective strategies each party employs. For example, in terms of governing, Republicans are less likely to compromise; Democrats are more open to compromise.  This just reflects how much compromising goes on within their respective ranks – Republicans a little bit, Democrats a lot – and tends to set a different mindset in the way politics is viewed within each party.  But of late, Republicans, on this score, have experienced a bit of a shift in their perspective and strategizing.

The instigator of this shift has been Trump and his presidency.  In his more blatant identity messaging, he has promoted higher government deficits – to sustain lower taxes rates – and a larger government, traditionally un-Republican policies.  His base reacts to such policies with “who cares,” and voice their tolerance of such divergence with the satisfaction Trump offers them through his identity politics and rhetoric.  

The main concern has now become preventing illegal immigration and support of current policing policies as they pertain to minority populations.  More generally, the Trump Administration supports policies that advance natural rights’ biases, for example in how that administration has conducted its coronavirus policies.

[gravitascivics]

THE NECESSITY OF EMPATHY

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 While many people will readily believe that this nation, as any nation, probably has a number of incubating problems, they might question why they should really care. Afterall, if they are incubating, they probably don’t have much of an effect on the quality of their lives. But such problems can be, according to the journalist Ezra Klein, social/political explosives just waiting to burst on the scene and their ability to effect people can be extensive.  

Problems of racial relations, opioid use, loss of jobs to foreign producers, laws concerning firearms, tax policies and their effects on equality, abortion rights, etc. are or have been such problems.  Realization of such developments should encourage prudent citizens to know them and address them.  

In that vein, one would be helped to know why incubation of problems occurs. It turns out and makes sense that a lack of empathy plays an important role.  This posting looks at why this is the case.  According to Klein and backed up by such experts as the American neuro-endocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, it is difficult to engender empathy for people who do not belong to one’s defining, identity groupings.

         Relevant to this general condition, people view their identity along various domains.  They include the often-cited categories – e.g., race, nationality, ethnicity – but also less thought of classifications – class, careers, social relationships, religion, etc.  And with those categories in mind, when one considers the ever-present realities of life, most prominently the conditions of scarcity, one can see that economic/political conflicts are part of life.  

And often, people cannot resist defining such conflicts in terms of identity.  Both in terms of one’s emotions and what one sees as truth, identity classifications simplify those aspects of life both cognitively and emotionally.  Adding to the relevant mix of factors – factors that cause scarcity and factors that affect how people see scarcity and other social conditions – are ways people are disposed to define their identity.

         In turn, those factors not only determine membership, but also exclusion.  They assist one to identify those who don’t belong to one’s grouping.  The excluded lack some physical, social, economic, aesthetic, or some such quality or condition.  Those other people are seen not as individuals but as reflecting believed – often inaccurately – attributes that somehow “explain” any shortcomings they might be experiencing.  

These shortcomings might include full allocation of civil rights, economic standing, social recognition, or some combination of these types of rights or benefits.  For example, poverty, under such thinking, results from laziness; unjust treatment by authority figures results from criminal tendencies; unfair labor treatment results from illegal status such as is the case for many immigrants.  The point is these problems under the rubric of identity thinking targets groups, not individuals.  

Therefore, two levels of faulty thinking take place:  believing incorrect information and attributing inaccurately supposed group attributes (that might or might not exist) to individuals.  Or stated in more common language, people engage in prejudicial judgements.

Is this natural for people to do?  Yes and no. It is natural for people to believe well of or empathize with people who belong to one’s perceived identity group; it is natural to not empathize and to hold in suspicion those who do not belong to one’s group.  Yet, to not empathize with other people proves to be inefficient and contrary to the common good.  

It stands in the way – through a variety of dysfunctional social arrangements and processes – of benefiting from the potential these perceived “other” people could contribute.  And given the realities of reciprocity, one can see how unjust treatment emanating from a lack empathy can lead to all sorts of social problems.

So, how can one encourage empathy?  What seems logical is for educators to plan and to implement appropriate civics instruction that at least approaches an important accomplishment.  That is, it identifies and respects what is natural; that is, the instruction recognizes the existence of prejudicial tendencies and does not underestimate the power of their influence.  People are prone to, in part, define their social world in terms of Us vs. Them.  

This suggests that, one, lessons need to point out this tendency and instruct students as to its inaccuracy.  Two, point out that a belief in these inaccuracies leads to inefficiencies not least of which is a less than an optimal economy that can miss providing many potential opportunities.  And three, provide instruction that exposes students firsthand to as many relevant realities as are possible and safe.

This third goal reflects another factor.  It turns out that empathy occurs more readily by experiences that expose a person to the actual, relevant events or conditions.  In the ideal, teaching a student about how migrant workers are treated would be greatly enhanced by students actually spending some time with these workers.  Short of that, videos of their treatment would be helpful.  Just reading about it would be less helpful.  The fuller the exposure is, the more likely an empathetic response will occur, and the more powerful the instructive impact will be.

So, to remind the reader of the initial question of this posting – why care about incubating problems? – the answer has to do with the practical concerns of what results from mistreated and mis-defined members of the polity.  Those problems are affecting significant numbers within the nation.  

That is, a society that harbors an inability to empathize with all identity groups making up the populous – or more accurately, with the individuals who makeup those groups – leads to dysfunctional conditions.  Those conditions are legal, political, social, and economic in nature.  It happens to be a losing proposition on many fronts.

[gravitascivics]

WALKING A BEAT?

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

This blog has made a connection between the natural rights view and scientific research with its methodology.  It’s not that one engages in scientific research naturally.  It took humans a long time to develop science.  Humans are naturally too emotional to readily engage in objectified studies about what they find important.  Even the notion of advancing knowledge for its own sake would seem foreign to people until a few hundred years ago.  At its beginning, science even got people in trouble in that it questioned their more natural tendency to think religiously.

         Probably the most celebrated case of this latter development was the trouble that Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei had.  He actually claimed that the earth was not the center of the solar system; it, he claimed, revolves around the sun, not vice versa.  And how did he arrive at his “speculation?”  He used scientific methods including utilizing his telescope.  But that view flew in the face of religious dogma prevalent in the Western world.

Up to his time, knowledge or what was taken for knowledge was primarily arrived at through logic (e.g., the work of Greek philosophers) or inspiration (e.g., the work of those who wrote the books of the Bible). With the pioneers of science, observation became a third viable way.  Its advent was not met with open arms by those in power.  But because of its payoffs, science came to be seen not only as legitimate but essential.

         But can science be deficient?  A growing number of voices are beginning to question its power especially when it comes to the study of human behavior.  It seems that what is judged to be so efficient in the study of the natural world is insufficient in the studying human endeavors.  Investigating many questions relating to humans in what they do and how they think and feel, science proves to be short-sighted especially when it comes to complex social arrangements.  

In political science, reductionism, narrowing a study to a limited set of factors or variables, seems to miss the richness of how and why humans behave the way they do in political and other related situations.  The shortfall occurs when those ways of thinking are applied to conditions that organizations exhibit.

         This blogger has posted online an “appendix chapter”[1] that reviews these shortcomings, but here he questions how scientific approaches affect other concerns. That is, this problem does not only affect the advancement of political knowledge. It also affects those professional fields that depend on political and the other social sciences as their personnel formulate policies and the implementations of those policies.  

An example of this, one that had to do with national defense, was the inability of Israeli intelligence to see the impending attacks that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Organizations tend these days to rely on scientific, objectified protocols to help them determine policy, while their environs do not lend themselves to the reductionist methods sciences employ.  

They also fund scientific research to conduct organizational studies.  This bias, when combined with other institutional practices (e.g., group thinking or rational analyses of cost/benefits), leads to the inability to recognize growing, “incubated” problems.  They exist within their organizations according to research conducted by Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki.[2]

These problems fester, grow, and eventually burst upon the scene like the attacks on Israel back in ’73.  This is not a matter of incompetent practices; those practices are responsible for organizations growing and being successful.  By so growing, these organizations become complex entities, and establish the conditions that potentially make the utilization of purely scientific research insufficient.

As this blog has indicated repeatedly, science is powerful.  Its ability to discover reality is without equal.  But in various ways it leads to false security as this Israeli example illustrates.  Through its reductionism it lacks richness.  The study of humans, especially, calls for holistic studies in which the richness of various environments or environmental elements can be considered and analyzed in their wholeness.  This often includes the emotional richness studied subjects bring to situations but cannot be reduced to measurable sets of finite variables.

This writer, from his own experience, can add another telling example.  He can remember, when he was quite young in New York City, the neighborhood policeman walking his beat.  This policeman, who was generally friendly, would capture his admiration as the man in blue could expertly swing his baton or truncheon.  Such cops are depicted in old films, for example the film, Singin in the Rain.  

Then came the scientific-inspired systems theory to study large organizations – for example, the New York City Police Department – and that “walking” cop disappeared.  And with his disappearance, police departments, such as New York’s, lost a source of invaluable, holistic information.  This became serious in large cities.  While there is a good deal of rhetoric bemoaning this loss, especially with cases such as the incident with George Floyd, cost/benefit analyses prohibit that source’s return.[3]

[1] URL site for this appendix is https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed July 8, 2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.

[3] Apparently, cops do walk where people congregate but not in neighborhoods.  They are labor intensive and judged to being either inefficient or too costly.

[gravitascivics]

BELIEVING WHAT ONE WANTS, PART II

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message. As for this posting, the reader is strongly encouraged, if he/she has not done so, to read the preceding posting, “Part I.”]

 In the last posting, this blog quotes a portion of the character’s, Howard Roark (of The Fountainhead[1]), defense.  He was accused and admitted to bombing a building project he designed.  He was betrayed in that his design, contrary to his agreement with the architect of record, was abandoned and the buildings that were being constructed would be quite different from what he had in mind.  

This abandonment of his ideas, he claims, did offense to his personhood, his creativity, and his self-centered interests.  His speech delegitimizes the notion of altruism.  The movie version of the story coincides with the ascendency of the natural rights view of governance and politics and probably plays its modest role in that shift. As such, this defense draws out the essence of Roark’s civic morality.  

It goes a long way in determining how natural rights advocates judge most public issues by focusing on the value of liberty.  They can also hold other values, such as equality, but if they do, they are secondary at best.  Often, with those who hold this value strongly, this sense serves to belittle other perspectives – altruism, communality, collaboration, teamwork, etc. In an age of polarization (the current state of American politics), the likelihood of encountering arguments reflecting the prominence of liberty becomes greater and such encounters are more likely to be intense.

Can one see the same sort of encounters with those who hold equality – e.g., believers in critical theory[2] – as the ultimate value?  Yes, but given the current nature of American politics, the incidence of encountering such advocates is less likely.  As this blog points out, that side of political thought with its corresponding political party, the Democratic Party, has much more diversity among its advocates.  Therefore, their politics demands greater compromise and softer messaging.

Of course, the average person does not give this question – what is my political moral position? – much conscious thought.  One seems to adopt, without much formal thinking, what one grows up to accept. Also, as this blog explains in a previous posting, such factors as maturity have their effects.  

What one is likely to do in growing up, if so inclined, is to see what people generally hold to be the acceptable way to see and feel about such moral concerns in one’s social circles – especially in one’s family.  It probably has to do with where and with whom that socializing takes place.  But once in place, those beliefs and feelings tend to be ensconced within one’s personal psychology.  People are not generally disposed to having these basic biases change.

Historically, there have been elections in which one has seen vast shifts in how people vote and express their values.  FDR’s first victory at the presidential level seems to indicate such an election.  If one reflects on what was going on, that demonstrates how extreme conditions need to be in order to see ample numbers of people changing how they would have voted otherwise.  In that case, a global depression triggered such a change in 1932.

And this reluctance to change one’s basic moral sense in politics or any aspect of life reflects how values and beliefs can be self-defining in their role of how one sees oneself.  And the evidence shows that it not only goes a long way in determining current behavior but also what is accepted as truth. Here’s what an article in Psychology Today has to say:

Why do people so easily believe false things?

There are probably as many answers to this question as there are people who have ever believed falsehoods. Nonetheless, psychologists have shown that a relatively small set of cognitive biases or mental shortcuts can explain a lot about how false notions take root. One of the most agreed-upon ideas in the field of psychology is that people routinely use mental shortcuts to understand what happens around them. All kinds of things occur in the world around us, and we don't always have the time or energy to sit down and carefully examine all of them. So, we tend to use quick and largely unconscious rules-of-thumb to determine what we should believe—and these shortcuts sometimes steer us in the wrong direction.[3] 

These “rules-of-thumbs” are generally called heuristics.

         And one source for heuristics is a person’s emotions or, as it applies here, what a person wants to be true.  What happens usually among people instead of their reason and logic guiding what they want, what they want drives their reason and logic. And unfortunately, this stream of thoughts and feelings applies to the way people see or “discover” political reality. Known as “emotional reasoning,” it leads people/voters astray without them ever knowing it.  

To complete the thought, this affects personal matters as well.  This can range from health concerns to how one interacts with one’s family members.  So, the detrimental effects are not just fodder for yelling sessions at the news broadcasts, but in how one interacts with those one encounters daily.  

And all of this reminds the writer of the distinction Plato made centuries ago. And that is of the differences distinguishing knowledge, beliefs, and ignorance.  Knowledge is what one knows is true, belief is what one thinks is true, and ignorance is what one does not know.  Of course, according to Donald Rumsfeld, there is also what one does not know he/she does not know.

Surely, the message can’t be that because one has moral positions with accompanying emotional feelings, one cannot see politics objectively so as to form positions aligned with reality.  No, instead the message is, especially to civics teachers, this potential problem needs to be recognized and instruction should be designed and administered to address it.  

This is seen as a major problem in an age of polarization since by its nature, these times tend to heavily energize one’s emotions and, in turn, strain people’s ability to detect reality.  So, while people treat certain beliefs as knowledge, these beliefs are not and that leads to dysfunctional decision-making in politics or in the other aspects of life.

[1] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN:  Bobbs-Merrill, 1943) AND King Vidor (director), The Fountainhead (the film), Warner Brothers, 1949 AND “Howard Roark’s Courtroom Speech,” Work the System, n.d., accessed September 29, 2020, https://www.workthesystem.com/getting-it/howard-roarks-courtroom-speech/ .

[2] That is, those who adhere to this construct see this nation’s – or, for that matter, the Western world’s – social/economic/political arrangement as being in the grip of an economic, exploitive class.  They, critical theorists, favor collectivist solutions to the problems of inequality.

[3] David B. Feldman, “Why Do People Believe Things That Aren’t True?”  Psychology Today, May 12, 2017, accessed September 27, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/201705/why-do-people-believe-things-aren-t-true .

[gravitascivics]

BELIEVING WHAT ONE WANTS, PART I

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 This blogger, before addressing the general challenges civics teachers face regarding political values and how they play out in the classroom, wishes to remind the reader what this blog’s goal is in the current set of postings.  That goal is to provide an explanation of how a natural rights political culture affects federalist aims a teacher might hold.  

So, this posting in a summary way, reviews some of the basic moral claims that a natural rights political culture promotes.  To begin, part and parcel of a dominant political view is to identify what it holds to be moral when it comes to political calculations.  This is especially important when the issues at hand are not so easily discerned as to what people should do on a moral basis. Those types of concerns pop up all the time and not just politicians or elected officials need to address them, but the average citizen needs to do so as well.

         And when it comes to the typical situations that Americans face, two political values tend to be paramount in such calculations.  That is the values of liberty and equality.  It seems that these two concerns come to the fore most often among the array of issues that policy makers consider.  And usually a good deal of contention characterizes those deliberations.

For example, policies over welfare or health care illustrate the point.  People who support government involvement tend to cite equality as their relevant concern; while those who oppose government action look to liberty to bolster their claims.  And one can divide these fights, to some degree, between those who hold natural rights positions – as in everyone is responsible for his/her own fate – and those who hold onto more communal responses that seem to count on federalist values – as in “we’re all in this together.”

Natural rights’ rationales advocate against communal responses especially, if by communal, one means government action – along with its coercive abilities.  After all, government can put people in jail.  They support their contentions with the belief that counts on people being responsible for their own fates and any reliance on government, among other negative consequences, undermines people meeting their responsibilities.  

Another important example in which natural rights advocates repeatedly express their concerns is over government regulations of businesses.  They generally argue that such government interference only hurts economic growth and, therefore, hurts everyone.  This is claimed despite evidence to the contrary assuming regulations are within reasonable boundaries.[1]

On an emotional-moral level, what advocates seem to stress is the near sanctity of the individual.  It is he/she whose sense of worth motivates him/her to accomplish good or even great things.  One is reminded of the novel or movie, The Fountainhead,[2] originally written by Ayn Rand.  In that story, the main character, Howard Roark, is brought to trial for dynamiting a building project that he designed as its architect.  This designing was done surreptitiously, and the project went astray from his design. At trial, in his only statement of defense, he states he was deprived of his agreed upon basis for doing the project – that his design not be changed.

In his speech he gives probably the most cogent rationale for the natural rights view.  Here is a taste of that testimony:

The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed.  He places relations first.  He declares that man exists in order to serve others.  He preaches altruism.

         Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.

No man can live for another.  He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body.  But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and versed the base of mankind’s moral principles.  Men have taught every precept that destroys the creator.  Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent.  He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.  The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept.  The nearest approach to it in reality – the man who lives to serve others – is the slave.  If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit?  The conquered slave has a vestige of honor.  He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures.  He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love.  But this is essence of altruism.[3]

But as for this view as an overall bias, the point to draw is that it holds a particular sense of liberty or, as it is called, natural liberty.  Succinctly, that form of liberty holds that people has the right to determine one’s values and beliefs and to be able to behave accordingly (short of interfering with others to do likewise).  A “true believer” of this construct holds natural liberty as his/her ultimate or trump value.  Or stated another way, for him/her, he/she could claim:  “Give me liberty or give me death.”  

[1]See Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (New York, NY:  Public Affairs, 2019).

[2] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN:  Bobbs-Merrill, 1943) AND King Vidor (director), The Fountainhead (the film), Warner Brothers, 1949.

[3] “Howard Roark’s Courtroom Speech,” Work the System, n.d., accessed September 29, 2020, https://www.workthesystem.com/getting-it/howard-roarks-courtroom-speech/ .

[gravitascivics]

SOME DEMOGRAPHICS IN ELECTION YEARS

As the nation approaches the election, it is a good time to review the makeup of the electorate.  In the time leading up to the last presidential election, The Pew Research Center published information that indicated how the electorate was changing from the 1990s.[1]  The assumption here is that those changes between 1992 and 2016 have indicated certain patterns and the patterns are still in place.  If so, the 2016 information provides contextual background for the polarization this blog is currently addressing and will affect the upcoming national elections.

         For example, one telling figure informs one of how the non-Hispanic whites’ share of registered voters dropped from 84% in 1992 to 70% in 2016.  The Hispanic share just about doubled, but was still a single percentage figure, 9% (up from 5% in ’92).  During that time, the black percent increased from 10% to 12% and the mixed-race percent went up from 1% to 5%.  Altogether, non-white percent has shot up from 16% to 26% during those twenty-four years. Today, an estimate has it that the white population share is at 60.7% and there is a projection that that percent will fall below 50% by 2045.

         These kinds of shifts and projected changes have and will have political repercussions.  This blog, in its review of the growing polarization issue, has pointed out some of these.  In short, political analysis needs to recognize the makeup of both major parties and how it is changing.  Overall, the changes are more heavily pronounced on the Democratic biased side.[2]

That side in 1992 was 76% white, 17% black, and only 6% Hispanic.  In 2016, the percentages were 57% white, 21% black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian, and 5% “other.”  These numbers further support the descriptive generalization this blog has made – the Democratic Party is, relative to the Republicans, the diverse party. Compare these numbers with the Republican/Republican leaning makeup:  in 1992, 93% white, 3% Hispanic, 2% black; and in 2016, 86% white, 6% Hispanic, and 2% black.

         Another shift of note in the electorate has to do with age.  Due to an aging Baby Boomer generation and the increased longevity among them, the median age of registered voters increased from 46 to 50 between ’92 and ’16.[3]   Adding to this shift is the added effect of the decreased birth rates in the subsequent generations since the Baby Boomer generation’s procreating years.  

Of special note is that the Republican/Republican leaning voters were relatively younger than the Democratic side back in ’92 but in ’16 they were a good deal older.  According to the Pew Center report, the GOP side was, in ’92, 61% under 50 (38% were 50 and older), but in ’16, 41% under 50 (58% were 50 and over).  For the Democratic/Democratic leaning side:  in 1992, 57% were under 50; and in 2016, only 42% were 50 and over.

How about in education?  In a time when Americans have generally become better educated (in 1992, 50% of voters did not have any college exposure, in 2016 that figure dropped to 33%), the percentage of four-year college degreed Americans increased from 23% in ’92 to 33% in ’16.  Added to that shift has been the relative proportion of how educated each side of the political divide has become.  

Republicans were the better educated electorate in 1992, but that changed significantly by 2016.  The numbers are:  28% of Republican voters had college degrees in ’92 compared to 31% in ’16 (with some college exposure, the percentage increase was 28% to 35%); 21% of Democratic voters had degrees in ’92 compared to 37% in ’16.  Or stated another way, the portion of Democratic voters that had no college experience dropped significantly from 55% in 1992 to 32% in 2016.

What has been the change among non-whites in terms of college education?  The change between ’92 and ’16 for this demographic can be viewed from different perspectives.  As indicated above, non-whites account for a larger portion of the voting population.  There are two categories of note:  non-whites with college degrees and non-whites without degrees.  Non-whites with college degrees went up (3% to 8%) and the category non-whites without degrees also went up (13% to 21%).

Further context:  in 1992, 63% of registered voters were non college degree holding whites. That percentage fell to 45% in 2016. But in terms of the share of all voters who were white and had gotten degrees that only edged up four percentage points (21% to 25%) between those two years.

Another demographic category experiencing a shift is religious membership.  Here, those who do not identify with any religion have increased in their percent from 8% in 1992 to 21% in 2016.  And that increase is found more often on the Democratic side.  That, in effect, widens the gap in terms of religion.  That side, the Democratic side, was noted for having 29% classifying themselves as atheist, agnostic, or non-affiliated in 2016.  It was only 10% in 1992.

As for Democrats or Democratic leaning respondents, in 2016, 11% were white mainline Protestants, 10% white Catholics, and 8% white evangelicals.  Together, these three groups had fewer percentages in 2016 than in 1992.  In terms of black Protestants, they constitute 15% of all Democratic voters. Hispanic Catholic make up 6%. These last two groups have not changed in terms of percentages since 1992.

On the Republican side, change has been very small.  To no surprise, they are more likely to be affiliated with a religion, and that likelihood is increasing.  There, 2016, the numbers were:  35% of Republican voters were white evangelical Protestants, 18% were white Catholics, 17% were white mainline Protestants, and 12% were religiously unaffiliated.  This last rate rose six points in the years between 1992 and 2016.

The Pew report states, “There has been little change in the share of all GOP voters who are white evangelical Protestants or white Catholics over the past two decades, but the share who are white mainline Protestants has declined 12 points.”[4]  This last bit of information further heightens what this blog is reporting, i.e., demographic factors seem to be feeding the polarization forces one finds among the electorate.

Surely, after the upcoming election has taken place and groups such as the Pew Center do their analyses of the results or any surveying they do, one can see if the assumption cited earlier bear out, i.e., that the trends the 2016 analysis discovered have continued if not increased in the subsequent years.  

If a civics teacher chooses to address these or similar numbers, students can probably add to any ensuing discussion by relating anecdotal information as to whether their home or neighborhood life resembles or stands in counter distinction to the trends the above statistics point out.

[1] “1. The Changing Composition of the Political Parties,”  The Pew Research Center (September 13, 2016), accessed August 31, 2020,

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/1-the-changing-composition-of-the-political-parties/..

[2] By Democratic biased side, the reference is to those voters who either vote Democratic or tend to vote Democratic.

[3] Readers should note these percentages refer to registered voters and not the population, as a whole.  According to one site, the current median age is 38.3.  See “United States Population,” Worldometer (n.d.) accessed August 31, 2020, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/#:~:text=The%20median%20age%20in%20the%20United%20States%20is%2038.3%20years.

[4] Ibid.

[gravitascivics]

SOME TURNS THAT THE SELF TAKES

[Note:  This posting is the third of a series of postings regarding adolescence.  The reader is invited to click on the previous two postings – and any other postings – that lead to the content of this one.]

This posting continues looking at how adolescents’ thinking changes mostly during the teenage years.  To this point, this blog has highlighted a few biological changes and provides a look at how adolescents acquire an ability to abstract what they judge to be important information and, through mostly deductive thinking, are able to formulate their own models over why conditions are the way they are.

         This posting moves on and first addresses a related skill to modeling – the product of abstract thinking – that teenagers do.  That’s relativistic thinking.  It is related because through this ability a youngster finds out that what he/she just accepted before as being what is – and this includes ethical dicta – are comments or messaging reflecting relative judgments and that that includes what is considered ethically good or bad.  In general, morality becomes a whole new area of concern in that it can be questioned and “manipulated.”

         As was pointed out in the last posting, adolescents are more likely than younger children to question what others say.  They no longer just accept things just because some adult says them. In addition, as Michael Chandler[1] explains, they better understand that what others say are not bits of knowledge, but instead are beliefs.  

As Plato pointed out centuries ago, beliefs lie between ignorance and knowledge even if they are stated as knowledge. Teenagers, especially if the message is less than pleasing, are apt to question or reject messages that others convey. In short, they come to understand there are few absolute truths and that what others say are instead usually relativistic claims.

This turn has practical consequences, especially given the heightened sense teenager feel to seek gratification that was mentioned in the last posting.  Rules, for example, take on a more relativistic quality as oppose to how they were initially presented by parents; i.e., as absolutes.  In addition, rules can be better categorized.  Some merely reflect common sense – look both ways before one crosses the street – while others reflect group or society’s biases – place one’s napkin on one’s lap especially when the family goes out to eat.

Of course, some of these societal rules, while relative to societal standards, do hit upon important, life-affecting behaviors like those associated with dating.  But whether they are serious or not, teenagers are known to question and even test the boundaries of these rules.  Of course, not all adolescents stay within the lines of acceptability or even the law.  

And life and success at school, be it in a civics classroom or not, provides ample opportunities to question and break some rules. These, of course, can summon disagreeable consequences for both the teenager and the adults involved.  Parent conferences tend to be less than happy occasions.

         This posting, secondly, looks at another acquired ability or, perhaps better stated, a newly found topic for the youngster to consider and that is thinking itself.  Psychologists and other scholars call it metacognition.  Meta means self-referential, so when one thinks about what and how one thinks, one is engaged in a metacognitive activity.

This other development is what is akin to the mind holding up a metaphorical mirror to itself and becomes a significant type of thinking as the young person transpires through these years.  It usually takes the form of an adolescent becoming conscious – monitoring – his/her thoughts or line of thinking as it happens.  This has potentially important consequences.

         The youngster, through this inward-looking process, can gain control over what he/she thinks and consequently how he/she behaves.  For example, studying can become more targeted and more effective.  In terms of thinking of others or of social events or conditions, the teenager gets better at looking inward and passing judgment on how well he/she is seeing or analyzing what is happening around him or her.  

As mentioned above, he/she can formulate models that explain interactions – like during conversations – and how well his/her goals or aims are being met or dismissed.  This “intellectualizing” adds richness to his/her self-consciousness.

Self-labeling, as this blog has pointed out before, takes on a more emotional quality and is likely to greatly influence courses of action the youngster chooses to follow or avoid.  At the same time, he/she becomes aware that he/she does not have total control over what he/she thinks in terms of content and process.

         Emanating from the research and theorizing of David Elkind,[2] meta-thinking by adolescents can lead to these young people forming an “imaginary audience.”  That is, they begin to feel – more than believe – that they are the subject of their friends’ and acquaintances’ thoughts to an inordinate degree – that they, the others, are really talking about them and watching them.

Jane L. Rankin, et al.,[3]studied this form of egotistical thinking and found that it can be a source of undue pressure; a false move can lead to unbearable shame or embarrassment.  Of course, one can watch this dynamic as serving the central plot line of numerous situation comedies on TV, but in some cases this tendency can have tragic results. More than one life has been taken as a result of this thinking.

         It can also lead to the self-consciously derived “personal fable.”  This other aspect of this distorted thinking about oneself can also lead to dangerous results.  The personal fable, according to Elkind’s model, can generate within the young person a sense of invulnerability.  He/she begins to think that he/she can engage in risk-taking behaviors without suffering the danger the risk entails.  

While an imaginary audience is more pronounced among females, this sense of invulnerability, the personal fable, afflicts boys to a greater degree as their scores on related testing indicate.  Informally, one can see this among young males in one’s community.  In addition, the frequency of developing such a fable increases with age within the adolescent years.[4]

         On a more positive note – and one that can be deduced from the other developed characteristics described here – adolescents can more realistically understand that the thoughts and actions of others can have an influence or effect on a given group or a population.  In addition, that influence does not necessarily depend on the actor being present or even involved with what others are doing.[5]  This, in turn, can encourage a teenager to be careful about what he/she does or says.

         The next posting will continue by looking at some outcomes these reviewed developments among adolescents have.  They include some of the qualities and characteristics this and the last posting mentioned.  Specifically, it will highlight risk-taking, inhibition, and wisdom.  Some of the points to be made have already been referred to but they will be treated a bit more descriptively as to how they affect secondary and younger college students.

[1] Michael Chandler, “The Othello Effect:  Essay on the Emergence and Eclipse of Skeptical Doubt,” Human Development, 30, 3 (1987), 137-159, summary accessed January 12, 2020, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-30890-001 .

[2] David Elkins, “Egocentrism in Adolescence,” Child Development, 38, 4, 1025-1034.

[3] Jane L. Rankin, David J. Lane, Frederick X. Gibbons, Meg Gerrard, “Adolescent Self-Consciousness: Longitudinal Age Changes and Gender Differences in Two Cohorts,” Journal of Research on Adolescence, 14 (February 4, 2004), 1-21.  Abstract accessed January 13, 2020, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2004.01401001.x .  This sort of self-consciousness is found to be more prevalent in girls than boys.  This study also distinguished between public self-consciousness and private self-consciousness.  Private self-consciousness has a greater effect on adulthood.

[4] Amy Alberts, David Elkins, Stephen Ginsberg, “The Personal Fable and Risk Taking in Early Adolescence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, 1 (January 1976), 71-76.

[5] Robert L. Selman, The Growth of Interpersonal Understanding:  Development and Clinical Analysis (New York, NY:  Academic Press/Victoria, Canada:  AbeBooks, 1980).

[gravitascivics]

A CHANGE IN EMPHASIS? PART I

[Note:  If the reader has taken up reading this blog with this posting, he/she is helped by knowing that this posting is the next one in a series of postings.  The series begins with the posting, “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-natural-rights-view-of-morality.html). Overall, the series addresses how the study of political science has affected the civics curriculum of the nation’s secondary schools.]

 With this posting, this blog reviews the content of those standards that the Center for Civic Education developed to guide the question-development process of its national testing program.  This writer wants to contextualize what follows and make an observation.  When one looks at the officialdom of social studies at the national level one sees an observable change going on.  

Of recent vintage, the federal government’s Department of Education efforts has included a joint project with the professional organization of social studies educators, the National Council for the Social Studies.  That project has issued a set of national standards for civics.  Through that effort, one can sense that a change of direction might be in the works – hopefully, the C3 Framework,[1] what its resulting standards can be called, indicates a move away from a natural rights stance to one that engages in a more normative approach.  Time will tell.

But as to the efforts that leadership has taken up to this point – those efforts that have influenced the general approach instruction has implemented – one can look at two concrete products.  They are the textbooks that school districts have distributed to teachers and the national standards that have been used to evaluate the state of civics education.  This posting starts with the standards.

To begin, one can look at the Educational Testing Service standards that were published in 2003.  Below is a sample of these standards as well as those of 2014 and they are followed by how this writer evaluates them, i.e., he reports on a growing awareness of how un-communal civics instruction had become.  This posting looks at the former standards and the next posting will highlight the 2014 standards.

As one reads the following excerpt, one should observe the tenor and priority the writers of that document express.  This review chooses from 2003 standards those items regarding rights and responsibilities of citizens:

Content summary and rationale

One of the primary purposes of American government is the protection of personal, political, and economic rights of individuals. It is essential, therefore, for citizens to understand what these rights are and why they are important to themselves and their society.

Few, if any, rights can be considered absolute.  Most rights may be limited when they conflict with other important rights, values, and interests.  An understanding of both the importance of rights and the need for reasonable limitations upon them provides a basis for reasoned discussion of issues regarding them.

1. Rights of individuals. Students should be able to explain why certain rights are important to the individual and to a democratic society.

To achieve this standard, students should be able to

·       identify the following types of rights and explain their importance

·       personal rights, e.g., to associate with whomever one pleases, live where one chooses, practice the religion of one's choice, travel freely and return to the United States, emigrate

·       political rights, e.g., to vote, speak freely and criticize the government, join organizations that try to influence government policies, join a political party, seek and hold public office

·       economic rights, e.g., to own property, choose one's work, change employment, join a labor union, establish a business

·       identify contemporary issues regarding rights, e.g., school prayer, employment, welfare, equal pay for equal work ...

Content summary and rationale

An understanding of the importance of individual rights must be accompanied by an examination of personal and civic responsibilities.  For American democracy to flourish, citizens must not only be aware of their rights, they must also exercise them responsibly and they must fulfill those responsibilities necessary to a self-governing, free, and just society.

2. Responsibilities of individuals. Students should be able to explain why certain responsibilities are important to themselves and their family, community, state and nation.

To achieve this standard, students should be able to identify such responsibilities as the following and explain their importance

·       personal responsibilities, e.g., taking care of themselves, accepting responsibility for the consequences of their actions, taking advantage of the opportunity to be educated, supporting their families

·       civic responsibilities, e.g., obeying the law, respecting the rights of others, being informed and attentive to the needs of their community, paying attention to how well their elected leaders are doing their jobs communicating with their representatives in their school, local, state, and national governments, voting, paying taxes, serving on juries, serving in the armed forces[2]

Admittedly, what follows is the writer’s interpretation; see if the reader agrees.

First, there is seemingly little to disagree with here.  A close reading, though, reveals a bias.  In terms of the thrust of these standards’ language, while guardedly adding language concerning communal conditions almost as an afterthought, the standards favor individual liberty.  Students are encouraged to pursue individual choices.  This is in line with traditional liberal thought as has been described in this blog.

While there is a reference to certain values, they are mostly procedural ones such as participating in the political process, but only minimally.  How does the language pursue communal interests?  Honestly, does the above language encourage community or is it a language reflecting a systems approach with a structural and functional perspective? As the reader might guess, this writer sees the language as promoting individualism.

Does it harken to a view of government as being of and by its citizens or does it paint a picture segregating the citizenry from its government?  The claim here is that the language communicates a separation and, while there is a concern for civic responsibilities, the emphasis is on individual liberal rights in that that standard is highlighted first and has more substance.  The next posting will pursue this investigation into the next set of standards the Center for Civic Education issued in 2014.

[1] To see the product of that effort see National Council for the Social Studies, Preparing Students for College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) (Washington, D. C.: NCSS, 2013), accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.socialstudies.org/c3 .  To see this writer’s critique of that effort, see Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020) particularly Chapter 1, “C3 Framework of Standards.’’

[2] Center for Civic Education, National Standards for Civics and Government (Calabasas, CA: Center for Civic Education, 2003), 35-36.