“STUDENT” AS A COMMONPLACE, V
This posting continues this blog’s review of William Schubert’s commonplaces of curriculum development by describing the commonplace, the student, and its concerns. After providing accounts of other concerns – personal, social, and economic student interests – this posting will turn its attention to political student interests.
Previously this blog has placed an emphasis on the idea that American individual political interests are foremost defined in terms of individual rights. Regarding the natural rights perspective, which is prominent today, the whole approach places emphasis on the premise that individuals’ worth is established by their ability to make choices and act upon them. This is what the natural rights perspective holds in highest priority.
To those who advocate this natural rights position, the centrality of rights takes on a moral status. That moral stand holds that human beings should conduct themselves to maximize the range or scope of everyone’s liberty. Liberty, or freedom, is defined as the ability to control one’s life according to the dictates of one’s own judgments. Any activity that diminishes that freedom for oneself or others is seen as being immoral. This principle is what Jeffrey Reiman calls individual sovereignty.[1]
In an earlier description of the liberated federalism model, as opposed to natural rights, this blog addressed the concept of constitutional integrity. This other construct veers away from the natural rights’ almost radical view of individual prerogatives. According to Philip Selznick, whose writings are more aligned with federalist thought, all persons have the same claims of equality of treatment as an expression of their intrinsic worth.[2]
So, the liberated federalism perspective puts a high regard on individual rights as a component of the federalist view,[3] but counters a view that glorifies the nation’s individualism and the rights attached to it.[4] Liberated federalism, in other words, adds a strong concern for communal needs beyond the individual, but maintains a strong commitment to what constitutes the rights and integrity of the individual.
Despite this emphasis on the individual in the nation’s professed political ideology, Americans have become highly dependent on government services.[5] Since it is incongruent with the individualism of the nation, the collective feeling is one of resenting this dependence. The incongruence encourages an even higher demand for governmental neutrality. Choices in resulting public programs are made through certain curious practices such as cost-benefit analysis which attempts to dehumanize the factors that go into governmental decision-making.
Cost-benefit analysis places dollars and cents measures to preferences, but in doing so, shuns overarching moral principles and disregards the interests of the generations yet to be born.[6] Economists write of using marginal analysis (what engenders the most benefit for the least cost at the margin) to determine rational decision-making factors, again with the effect of dehumanizing those human factors.
Decision-making, as is called for in the liberated federalism perspective, should consider human commitments and moral assumptions. These factors should be supported by social policy, but they are intangible and not subject to the calculations of marginal or cost-benefit analyses. Students’ interests in all this are about how they are introduced to the appropriate role of government to meet not only the needs of individuals, but also the welfare of the commonwealth.
The political interest of students includes becoming aware of the social practices that exist. They should also be made aware that there are other moral standards that do not necessarily see such analyses as cost-benefit, as immoral or counterproductive, but merely deficient. The liberated federalism perspective does not hold that these analyzing practices cease, but that in using marginal analysis or cost-benefit analysis, the practitioners or the consumers of such studies should be aware of their shortcomings.
With this basic introduction to what affects student political interests, the next posting will address the more personal factors that students have in relation to the vying influences they face in their civics coursework.
[1] Jeffrey J. Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarian Debate, edited by Cornelius F. Delaney (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994).
[2] Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, 2 (March 1, 1991).
[4] Matthew M. F. Miller, “The Radical Individualism Raging throughout America,” Shondaland (November 20, 2020), accessed September 27, 2023, https://www.shondaland.com/act/news-politics/a34729330/the-radical-individualism-raging-throughout-america/ AND Jean M. Twenge, Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York, NY: Atria Books, 2023).
[5] Matthew Spalding, “Why the U.S. Has a Culture of Dependency,” CNN (September 21, 2012), accessed September 27, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2012/09/21/opinion/spalding-welfare-state-dependency/index.html#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Wall%20Street,some%20type%20of%20government%20benefit.
[6] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
