#discovery method

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

This blog just finished a review of essentialist educational thought concerning American schooling and reported that despite that approach’s attempts at becoming more sophisticated, its application has been mostly limited to dispensing information.  That has been primarily in the form of lecturing and the use of media – film and film strips – to enhance the information that the students’ textbooks present.

         In terms of sophisticated efforts by essentialists, the blog pointed out the work of Robert Gagne – a behavioral education psychologist – with his five conditions of learning and nine instructional events.  Perhaps his work should be required in teacher preparation programs across the country.

         With that review, the blog will now address, as it did with parochial federalist curriculum, the commonplaces of curricular development – learners, subject matter, teachers, and milieu – as they apply to essentialist educational efforts.  With a general view of how essentialists go about developing the subject materials and activities they favor, readers will acquire a better insight into how natural rights biases affect civics education.  

Students or Learners

         Interested parties might ask:  what is known about the nature of students in relation to the principles of the natural rights/essentialist perspective?  This promotion of that perspective contains evidence regarding that nature and, in turn, can be utilized to support that construct’s implementation in America’s civics classrooms.

         Some of the issues to be addressed pertain to the individual interests of students, to the affected parties who deal with those students’ long-term interests, and to the conditions that students confront within the wider society.  What follows will focus on various areas of concern: student interests, student problems, and student educational requisites.  

It will answer the following questions:  what personal, social, economic, political, and pedagogic interests are benefited by using the natural rights construct in the teaching of government and politics at the secondary level?  This will not be an in depth inquiry into these issues (each can be the topic of extensive study), but a general review which sufficiently helps justify the adoption of the natural rights construct.

Personal Student Interests

         At the individual level, when attending secondary schools, students can be generally described as being in the adolescent period of their lives. Within American culture, profound changes take place in this stage of life.  This state of affairs is not necessarily apparent, in all its complications, to the adults with which the youths must deal.  In the area of maturation, various writers have addressed the prevalence of competitiveness during the adolescent years that young people experience.[2]

This aspect is highlighted here because it affects how predisposed young people are to accepting the capitalist nature of the American economy.  For example, there are times in which their numbers have grown more rapidly within the general population than the number of economic opportunities, particularly for those who are vying for employment at lower skilled levels.  This has led to an inordinate number of youths becoming discouraged by their prospects.[3]

         At a premium, more so than in the past, are good grades, sports awards, and other demonstrations of achievement.  The youngsters often begin to feel pressure from parental demands in these areas of concern.  These demands are offset by feelings of guilt on the part of parents when they are motivated to befriend their offspring.  This has led to confusing interactions among family members due to unclear parental roles.[4]

         Within such a pressured environment, knowledge of the causes of such conditions would help young people deal with the demands they feel.  Schools, for example in modern America, are often complex institutions.  The systems approach not only explains the manner in which governments are managed, but also other social institutions such as schools – thus the compatibility of the model.[5]

         In short, a systems approach to the study of government and politics could shed light on the structures of those schools and how they govern morally – assuming they do – and, in terms of political interactions, how these structures make demands on students.  Such concerns as roles and expectations could be placed within a logical whole.  That whole, in turn, could be analyzed and the position of the student and significant others could be placed mentally within that system.

         With that, the interests of different participants in the youths’ lives could be identified.  The policies emanating from those people, which often can seem to young people as arbitrary and capricious, could begin to make sense as those students are exposed to a more contextualized whole by which to identify and measure the various levels of power and influence among those other participants.

         That is, the position of students and significant others – fellow students, teachers, administrators, and staff members – could be meaningfully placed within that system.  The interests of different participants in young people’s environments can not only be identified but also talked about and understood within the system.

By doing so, a better comprehension can potentially emerge and those realities can even be seen in a more legitimate light.  In addition, the systems approach and the natural rights agenda are aimed to instill the cultural knowledge that would help those youngsters mature into productive and competitively prepared individuals.  This is serious business that cannot be left to curricular attempts which rely on methods such as inquiry and discovery.[6]  

Such other strategies leave students with possible erroneous beliefs about the world with which they deal or will deal in the future.  This concern with the lack of definitiveness that one can ascribe to inquiry or discovery methods can be noted in the literature back to the early 1980s.

 While [Willian C.] Bagley [leading essentialist] decried the deemphasis on the “exact and exacting studies” and the “disparagement of system and sequence in learning,” contemporary critics of the curricular innovations of the 1960s have charged the “discovery method” or “inquiry method” is inefficient and causes students to “reinvent the wheel” rather than master the funded knowledge of the past in an orderly way.  Contemporary critics argue that the process and method of learning has been overemphasized to the detriment of content.  While the innovators of the 1960s promised that they would teach children how to think, the critics of the 1970s and 1980s have argued that, in order to think, students must have something to think about. Like Bagley, they argue that the curriculum should have a content that is logically or chronologically structured.[7]

           Therefore, the personal interests of students, especially during adolescent years, are best served by providing them with fundamental, practical knowledge and fundamental skills (such as being able to read and comprehend information regarding the political realities of the polity).  In that way those students, as adults, will be able to adequately define their interests and act in a functional manner.

         This posting will end with this more practical message.  Next, the blog will address the social interests of students.  But it will start with one last reemphasis that this philosophical view, essentialism, highlights.  That is, the posting will begin with expressing a basic call or an expectation that one has of schools, especially public schools (in that taxpayer funds are involved).

That will be that those schools are meant to functionally prepare students to meet the challenges of adulthood.  So, the next posting, before addressing social interests, will add one more essentialist concern involving student interests and the role that schools, even in their civics offerings, are called upon to meet.

[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] This characteristic varies during different times and in various places or nations.  In the 1980s, David Breskin wrote of heightened levels of it during that time.  See David Breskin, “Teen Suicide,” Rolling Stone (November 8, 1984), 26-37.  More recently, levels seem lower in Korea. See You-Kyung Lee and Eunjin Seo, “Cooperative and Competitive Attitudes During Adolescence and Their Social and Academic Outcomes,” Journal of Youth Adolescence, 51, 4 (April 2022), 792-804.

[3] For example, Sam Quinones gives a compelling argument of how the loss of manufacturing jobs in America has been instrumental in the initial and continued popularity of opiates. See Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York, NY:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

[4] “Parenting: The Teen Years,” American Psychological Association (2011), accessed September 22, 2022, https://www.apa.org/topics/parenting/teens.

[5] Daniel Katz and Robert Louis Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1966).

[6] Even proponents of inquiry or discovery methods share in concerns over the viability of those methods.  See, for example, Cassie Quigley, Jeff C. Marshall, Cynthia C. M. Deaton, Michelle P. Cook, and Michael Padilla, “Challenges to Inquiry Teaching and Suggestions for How to Meet Them,” Social Educator, 20, 1 (Spring 2011), accessed September 22, 2022, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ940939.pdf.