JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XXV
An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
This posting continues a report on the expectation of schools that people share as an element of the commonplace, the milieu, in curriculum development.[2] Central to this milieu in twenty-first century America is the importance these Americans ascribe to individualism which effectively sways the expectations they have of civics instruction.
Anil Ananthaswamy comments on how individualism stacks up against other concerns. This researcher writes,
There’s actually a lot of agreement on the things that are considered to be most essential such as respecting America’s political institutions and laws and believing in individualism. There’s also considerable agreement on things that are considered less essential, such as the language one speaks, or whether someone was born in the US or has European ancestry.[3]
Seymour M. Lipset provides an extensive study of this American character trait. He writes that Americans are exceptionally supportive of individualism and anti-statism. Using comparative data, he demonstrates how, compared to the other modern industrial nations, the US ranks lower in taxes in such state-sponsored programs as welfare.[4] More recent studies continue to support these claims.[5]
In short, Americans are highly suspicious of governmental efforts to solve maladies and prefer private-for-profit approaches to dealing with communal concerns. Even public schools, some would argue, should shift to private-school arrangements.[6] In turn, these biases are not isolated but are associated with many other views and concerns.
For example, Americans have a very pragmatic view of education. Some have called this pragmatism as being anti-intellectual. Americans are wary of schools attempting to introduce academic subject matter that they – the public – do not understand. This was exemplified all the way back to the nation’s reaction to Sputnik in the late 1950s and 1960s and the reforms that ensued which were unintelligible to the public in general. Those reforms enjoyed a short longevity and were mostly dismissed within a decade.[7]
Americans believe education should be purposeful, for the most part, toward practical career goals. While this has resulted in different approaches used in schools over this century, a consistent antagonism toward highly academic bias has pervaded American campuses. Robert Maranto and Jonathan Wai share an interesting overview of American education. In their abstract introducing their study, they write,
Rooted in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as “Taylorist” factories with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence, prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist.[8]
The natural rights perspective matches closely to this seemingly consistent desire of the American public. For one, it treats government as a neutral institution. This blends with the anti-statist position of most Americans. While the systems approach recognizes the necessity of some government presence, it does not advocate any particular form for that presence nor for it to be extensive.
It leaves those types of decisions to the political interplay of the American public through the expression of demands and supports, mostly voting behavior. The instructional approach it favors does address from whence existing political pressures originate, but it does so in order for the student to gather explanations of the conditions that exist without projecting political biases for policy alternatives.
The natural rights perspective, with its reliance on political systems, is a fairly straightforward construct avoiding difficult incursions into philosophic arguments of political theory. The natural rights perspective most closely meets the expectations of American parents, i.e., that it should teach their youngsters what constitutes the government structure and give them a straightforward explanation of why the government is organized the way it is.
In doing so, it definitely avoids such messaging as was associated with federalist notions of communal, cooperative, and collaborative aims or goals that government should pursue. In its stead, one finds language that describes – and to a certain extent promotes – a transactional national stage in which the various parties go about competing for political favor from either government or other private parties.
This completes this blog’s review of Americans’ expectations of their schools’ civics instruction. Still to be covered are schools’ economic base and youth culture. With that, this blog will complete its report on the commonplaces of curriculum development as seen through the “eyes” of the natural rights construct.
[Note: As regular and ongoing readers of this blog might know, this blogger takes a break every four hundred postings. He did so after 400, 800, and now will do so after 1200 postings. As of his counting, this posting is number 1198. That leaves two more postings before the next break. He anticipates the break will last, at least, two months, maybe three. He has other projects, e.g., finishing his preparation of the re-edited collection of the blog’s second hundred postings. He looks forward to the break and getting back from it to resume producing this blog’s postings.]
[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] Joseph Schwab presents his conception of the commonplaces of curriculum development – they are subject matter, students, teachers, and milieu. See William H. Schubert, Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).
[3] Anil Ananthaswamy, “American Individualism and Our Collective Crisis,” Knowable Magazine, December 1, 2020, accessed October 23, 2022, https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2020/american-individualism-and-our-collective-crisis.
[4] Seymour M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996).
[5] See for example, “How Do US Taxes Compare Internationally?,” Briefing Book, The Tax Policy Center, 2018, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally AND Robert Rector, “Poverty and the Social Welfare State in the United States and Other Nations,” The Heritage Foundation, September 16, 2015, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/poverty-and-the-social-welfare-state-the-united-states-and-other-nations#:~:text=As%20a%20share%20of%20GDP,5%5D%20Ibid.%2C%20p..
[6] For example, see “Top Benefits of Private School vs. Public School,” Hotchkiss (n.d.), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.hotchkiss.org/top-benefits-of-private-school.
[7] For a short, but interesting, history, see Dave Roos, “How the Cold War Space Race Led to US Students Doing Tons of Homework,” History [Channel], August 13, 2019, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/homework-cold-war-sputnik#:~:text=The%20response%20from%20the%20U.S.,science%2C%20mathematics%20and%20foreign%20languages.
[8] Robert Maranto and Jonathan Wai, “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done about It,” Journal of Intelligence, 8, 1 (March 2020), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151121/. “Taylorist” refers to the work of Frederick Taylor on how production facilities, such as factories, should be run. Central to his view was the incorporation of mechanical and engineering principles to the management of labor and other production elements.
