The End of the Civic Society

There was an article in the Idaho Statesman today about a school in Idaho's rural dairy country.  It is a charter school with an educational emphasis on patriotism, capitalism, and individual freedoms.  It was a newsworthy story precisely because of how unusual the school is in its philosophical character.  Even in very red-state Idaho.  There was a subliminal implication in the reporting that state education officials harbor concerns about so radical an approach to teaching young people.    

Of course when I was a kid in Virginia and later North Carolina, our schools were just like North Valley Academy.  We said the Pledge of Allegiance, we sang "Our Country 'tis of Thee" and we studied Civics.   

In Civics class we examined the philosophies of the Founding Fathers, the Structure of Government, and most important, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The concept underlying education in Civics seems to have been that in order for America to maintain her dominant world economic, political and cultural position, her young students had to be educated in the doctrines that made America the giant that she had become.  Our minds were to be shaped, to some extent, according to the image of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  We were taught that liberty was the most important value, the keystone concept of our ethical world view.   

Now, however, Civics has been replaced by Social Studies. The National Council for the Social Studies (socialstudies.org) is an educational clearing house for teachers at every level, elementary through college/university.  The Council, composed of educators, views itself as responsible for formulating the educational objectives of Social Studies education, and they have published a Position Paper called "Curriculum Guidelines for Social Studies Teaching and Learning." It can be found at:

 http://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/Curriculum_Guidelines_SocialStudies_Teaching_and_Learning.pdf 

It is interesting to read the document, and everyone should.  I would draw my readers' attention to Section 3, where education in Social Studies is required to be Value-Based.  It reads as follows:   

The social studies program should consider the ethical dimensions of topics and address controversial issues while providing an arena for reflective development of concern for the common good* and the application of democratic**  values.

3.1 The program should help students understand the role that values play in decision making.

3.2 The program should give students the opportunity to think critically and make value-based decisions.

3.3 The program should support different points of view, respect for well-supported positions***, and sensitivity to cultural similarities and differences.

3.4 The program should encourage students to develop a commitment to social responsibility, justice****, and action.

3.5 The program should encourage students to examine and evaluate policy and its implications.

3.6 The program should give students the opportunity to think critically and make value-based decisions about related social issues. 

*As defined by whom?

**Please see my blog:  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Choice.

***Supported by whom?

**** Please see my blog:  Liberty and Justice. 

The italics are mine.  As you can see, the philosophical orientation of Social Studies teaching is very different from that of Civics, and its goal is to shape minds very differently to those of Washington, Jefferson and Adams.  The emphasis is not on liberty, it is on justice; the word liberty does not appear in the document at all and the word freedom appears only once, as academic freedom for the teachers.  It occurred to me even as a youngster, when Social Studies replaced Civics, that perhaps my teachers do not want to teach us The Constitution because they do not agree with it.  They view it as an obstacle to the world they are trying to build, they blame it for the injustices of the past.   

I do not believe that American educators have nefarious intent the way many conservatives do.  Teachers vote according to self-interest, just like everyone else, and since their salaries and the conditions under which they work are determined by The State, it would be disingenuous to be shocked that the vast majority of them are Statists.  I do not blame them for the steady decline in the intellectual levels of American youth; that falls squarely on the parents and our increasingly doofus culture.  Teachers are lion-hearted professionals who endure disrespect and even sometimes aggression in the ordinary pursuit of their duties.  It is beyond doubt an honorable calling.   

I think the change in philosophical direction marked by the shift from Civics to Social Studies has to do with the fact that teachers believe it is theirs as a profession to determine what must be taught, and they should be free from external influence (see the last sentence in the aforementioned Position Paper).  One could argue though is that it is precisely external influence that created Social(ist) Studies.  It is a derivation of a euro-globalist formula that derides patriotism and replaces it with a kind of world consciousness, one that conforms well to environmentalism, justice through the redistribution of poverty to the Middle Class, and the redistribution of political power from the individual to The State.   As a snobby europhile myself, I see in the American educator class a contempt for individual liberty that reminds me of my own disdain for certain American culinary traditions, like the abominable Bartlett pear half from a can, positioned on a leaf of iceberg lettuce, with a dollop of mayonnaise in the hollow center.   

Although I strenuously disagree with Social Statism, it is a well-reasoned school with many intelligent, thoughtful adherents.  The same can be said for the libertarianism of our Founding Fathers, however, and it would be a great example of respect for well-supported positions were American educators to give young minds similar access to those ideas as well.  Our political ancestors certainly had areas of shocking moral blindness; they did not see in The Constitution protection for the rights of women and black slaves, for example.  But Social Statism, logically extrapolated, has surpassed religion as the source of the greatest slaughters in world history (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, etc.).   

Finally, a disclaimer.  I hate making disclaimers, but I feel like I have to do it because, and I know this makes me sound like a euro-snob, Americans seem to have trouble with nuanced thinking.  I am not on the Left-Right spectrum; I am not arguing for the Right Wing.  I am not a Capitalist.  Like G.K. Chesterton, I believe that the problem with Capitalism is that it creates too few capitalists, not too many.  I agree with Chesterton that the best economic system ("distributionism") is one where the owners of the means of production are as small in scale and as many as possible, in other words, small business over big business.  Under the current state of affairs, the politicians of the Left and the Right facilitate the condensation of megacorporations, largely by eliminating competition and regulating small companies out of business.  Wealth is thus concentrated to a fantastic extent, and that wealth is in turn employed to support politicians friendly to General Electric, General Motors, Walmart, etc.  How else can you explain the relationship of left-of-center President Obama to GE, GM, and Wall Street?  It is what has been called "Crony Capitalism," and both sides of the aisle are equally contaminated.  It is the greatest example of the hypocrisy of Republicans, who preach the virtues of competition and then seek to destroy it, and of the Democrats, rich people who somehow acquire political power through public condemnation of their own class.  In an economy unadulterated by political power, corporations would not grow so large; they can only do so by the influence of government.   

If we wish to bring on the extinction of the United States in its current form and fuse our nation into some kind of a World Government community, I think the Social Studies curriculum is an excellent pathway.  It realigns the thinking of the young in precisely that direction.  I would favor building on our spectacular achievements, however, by restoring Civics.  Civics has Liberty as its core value, and Liberty is much easier to define than Justice, the core value of Social Studies.  It is not Justice or Fairness or Social Consciousness that has made America the greatest nation in history; it is our historical willingness to tolerate the freedom of the individual to a degree never known in human history.  The Civics curriculum I would design would not only concern itself with our successes, but also our failures, including why women and blacks did not have the status of full citizens, and why we permitted Civics to be replaced by Social Studies. 

Copyright 2012 Robert Albanese