Promoting "Good Citizenship" Over Political Ideology, Religion & Social Class

The key consideration for the conduct of interpersonal affairs is that the activities of people can harmonize without their ideas about ends and means being in agreement – Nicholas Rescher Pluralism (1995. Oxford. Paperback) p.180

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations...entangling alliances with none." ― Thomas Jefferson

The (Assumed) Basic Agenda of the U. S. Public Schools has long been baptized "promoting good citizenship." The fundamental mission of the public schools in the multicultural, putatively democratic society of the United States of America is to forestall or ameliorate conflict between different cultural and social subgroups, quite independently of whether such conflict is morally justifiable.

Clearly, "good citizenship" is seen as the fundamental, if not sole, goal of public schooling; especially when one considers that very few people would be willing to disregard conflict among groups in order to pursue any of the other vaunted aims of public education, e.g. acculturation and skills development.

Indeed, the very possibility of the public school structure serving its functions presumes such conflicts are under control. Consider the present proliferation of posters in public schools that declare, "No Place for Hatred." (Effective? Perhaps; disregarding student and public behavior at pre-game sports rallies.)

This subordination of many of the "obvious" goals of schooling to those of "stifling conflict," "getting along" or "respect for authority" is anything but a sign of irrationality, irresoluteness, ignorance or perversity, even though honored intellectual and social goals might suffer from emphasis on good citizenship.

In a society that imposes some form of primary education on all, "public" education by default, the rock-bottom demands for order and for the recognition of easily recognized value commitments, e.g. obedience, manners, timeliness, patriotism, etc., become the only foundations for functional mass education. This is particularly the case where great variations in family income or religious commitment are prevalent and likely to be persistent.

Also, this mission of pacification has supported commercial interests to exploit the vast territorial expanses and abundant natural resources of North and South America (and the world) resulting in the development of industries and patterns of settlement that tend to stabilize expanding local and national governance systems.

Persistent warfare, in the long run, dissipates wealth and threatens the stability of governing groups. War can be fatal to commerce. Conversely, commerce has played a substantial part, historically world-wide, in restraining military ambition, whether fed for the sake of domination, ideology, wealth, or religion. (But this perspective is greatly complicated by many other factors. See Berman in references.) In time, of course, commerce itself, since it minimizes the often substantial collateral damage caused by military action, may become a preferred means of pursuing domination, ideology, wealth, or religion. (See Downs in references.)

The preceding comments, I take it, are relatively common knowledge, discussed by many, many others in far more detail and exactitude than I have taken to present here. Those comments are not intended to identify heroes or villains, or to judge either militarism or commerce to be morally better than the other. Clearly, they fail to include mention, much less detail, of the millions of human beings who have fallen victim over the centuries of human history to their processes.

Our interest here is to understand how the public schools in the United States of America have fit in with the governance and social control processes of our society by pursuing their main goal of promoting good citizenship, even to the extent of often giving little more than lip service to other worthy pursuits.

Public education has been promoted and controlled to domesticate the populations who are be compelled, either by law, custom or poverty to accept its ministrations. The standard curricula of public education reflect the mission of producing "good citizens."

a. this mission is served by policies which promote "passive valuing", i.e. some kind of esteeming which does not involve the pursuit of that which is esteemed -- typical of so-called "appreciation" courses or of values clarification classes, smatterings of much, little of depth;

b. this mission is also served by policies which gainsay any of the conditions necessary to connecting action with value, i.e. the conditions of rationality, knowledge, ability, opportunity and consistency.
Since it is active valuing, the pursuit of values, which might cause conflict where values are not shared, certain policy directions can be drawn immediately from the above formulations. (See Constricting Social Ideals: breaking the values-action link to ensure "stability.".}

Thus, a rational school policy serving the social goal of reduced conflict could well promote -- with studied disregard:

a. irrationality, by letting evanescent preferences - whether of governance, organizational or student bodies - determine study options, rather than bias toward longer term considerations. (Universities and private schools, also, do this in favoring religious, social, or disciplinary traditions over scholarship);

b. ignorance, by granting certificates of completion without adequate testing for knowledge;

c. incompetence, by giving credit for "life experience" without clear definitions of skill obtained;

d. unequal opportunity, by tracking students by family background, or inadequate funding of educational programs; or

e. inconsistency of conduct, passing grades for "effort" or to satisfy school board demands for "higher achievement: -- read "higher recorded grades."

Hardly anyone would think such aims educational. Our considerations are suggestive, however, as to the persistence of these ills despite continued exhortation to eradicate them.

Final misgivings (from the political dimension of schooling): who decides what "operable" criteria of "good citizenship" are to be? Might they not come biased by political ideology, religion & social class?

To examine these issues further, see The Desired Ideal: a Docile Citizen? Or...?


Cordially
--- EGR

REFERENCES

Harold J.Berman, Law and Revolution. The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 (See "citizenship", throughout.)


Jacques M. Downs "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800-1840" The Business History Review, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), pp. 418-442

Abetting Fraud in School Systems and Universities

updated 12/31/18

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.-- Tacitus

School systems, colleges and universities across the country get billions of dollars from the federal government on the strength of their accreditation by various professional and state organizations. Accreditation is taken as assurance that the school has met certain standards.

Federal false claims legislation has been used to penalize colleges and universities who have acquired accreditation by hiding their failings from accrediting organizations.

But often, the accrediting organizations are in cahoots with the institutions they accredit. They overlook severe deficiencies, if they even bother to note them. Members of accrediting site-visiting teams are colleagues, even friends, of faculty and administration of schools which are candidates for accreditation.

The track to accreditation has been greased by all of the following:

a. schools providing luxurious hotel rooms demanded by visiting teams well-stocked with expensive liquor;

b. six week’s advance receipt of the examiner’s questions so that “spontaneous” answers might be prepared, and skeletons locked away in hidden closets;

c. visiting team members who were students or friends of faculty in the candidate schools;

d. faculty threatened with dismissal or non-promotion should they bring up program violations of the schools under consideration for accreditation;

e. interference from local politicians to ward off disaccreditation when malfeasance was discovered;

f. direct interference in state-level agencies to block disaccreditation because of felonious activity by school administration, e.g. selling drugs.

Faculty in candidate schools seem to be (or pretend to be) unaware that their personal efforts in disregarding published school procedures, or hiding embarrassing violations, will have abetted a fraudulent claim when -- seldom, if -- their institution makes application for federal funds.

This misfeasance at some of the country’s biggest universities persists unchallenged by federal authorities for two apparent reasons:

1. many schools are seen to have formidable legal protectors, especially universities with law schools;

2. many investigators do not understand how responsibility is situated in the university and what might be indicators of violation -- often overlooked by otherwise highly competent lawyers with organizational experience only in the business world.

To examine these issues further, see Combatting Educational Corruption

Cordially,

-- EGR

Sharia? Not to Worry. It’s Evangelical.

Dictionary definition eu- good + angelos messenger -- American Heritage Dictionary, College Edition (1981) p. 453

You can’t tell from the standardly capitalized title above, nor from the centuries-old Christian practice of appropriation, that “evangelical” can be understood to mean “good messenger” or “good message” without requiring a commitment to the content of that message. Indeed, most practicing American Christians of various sects recognize this possible neutrality when they forego challenge of their competitors who use the term “evangelical” to describe their own competing, likely specious, possibly heretical, efforts at proselytizing.

What every zealot worries most about is another zealot -- who is not a member of his own camp. This holds for religionists, their apostates -- e.g. Hitler and Stalin, who were brought up in religion -- and secularists, examples of which are available at any and many a TV talk show, think tank, corporation, laboratory or university.

Just as other businessmen are wary of new competitors, so have competing Peoples of the Book begun a very likely futile campaign to have sharia “outlawed” in legal practice (NYT, 7-31-11). They appear to be worried that Muslim American jurists, trained and sanctionable by the American Bar Association and higher courts, would somehow be able to permanently upset American traditions of Law. One need only note that even Christian jurists and legislators, despite many an attempt, have not managed to do that for very long:

a. Jim Crow lasted about 100 years.
b. Prohibition, 14 years;
c. exclusive heterosexual marriage rights are dissolving; and
d. removing tax exemptions from churches can now be discussed without camp followers threatening violence.

Even the public schools have been dragged into these conflicts via the path of curriculum controversy. The “intelligent design debate” has brought both zealots and their camp followers to the public stage trying to foist off the argument that their particular position is the unique and correct depiction of the role of Science in Education. As the public schools go, so -- they seem to think -- will go the culture.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Religion, Intelligent Design and the Public Schools: serving God to Mammon?


Cordially
--- EGR

Multiculturally Sensitive, or Just Making Excuses?

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.
-- T. H. Huxley (1871)

One of the oldest and easiest methods of “getting back” when an injury has been done is reprisal. For example, if someone in group A injures someone in group B, group B members grab anyone in group A, innocent, involved or not, and injure them “in return.”

Unfortunately, the practice of reprisal continues on today in many parts of the world, not the least important of which is in American public schools, where kids in gangs or cliques act this way up through college, as popular movies and TV illustrate. But teachers and administrators do, too.

Consider only the practice of giving class detentions, or making sports teams do “punishment exercises” for losing games, or depriving whole groups of privileges for “offenses” done only by a few. No Child Left Behind programs have closed schools and transferred teachers and administrators when only a small percentage of students failed to show “adequate progress” on standard tests.

Clearly normal school practices are not as barbaric as killing the family members of criminals, or bombing the home villages of suspected insurgents, or NCLB, but the violation of moral or legal principles is the same.

Now an interesting thing often occurs when we deal with an offender that depends upon whether he (or she) is one of “us” or belongs to a different group; or -- as we say as we pretend to be enlightened -- another “culture.”

If the offender is from another culture, there is a tendency to attribute the offensive behavior to a “cultural difference,” i.e. “all people like him are like that.” But if the offender is from our own culture, then the offensive behavior is “an individual act,” unless we can alienate the whole family, “who permits that behavior.”

On the other hand, if a child does not understand English well and gets low grades, as teachers, or administrators, or school board members, we can disavow any concern for the grade difference by “understanding” that “people like him or her” are just showing a “cultural” adversion to ambition and learning.

“Cultural difference” thus becomes a magic wand by which we punish or disregard the less than sterling achievements of the hapless who are different, somehow from what we “normal people” are.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Multiculturalism & The Problems of Immigration


Cordially
--- EGR

School Administrators: caught between rocks and hard places.

School administrators are expected to act in accordance with Federal regulations, State and Local Law, and School Board Policy. In addition they are supposed to work efficiently and with regard to public relations. On top of that they must be seen as caring and ethical, showing appropriate concern for faculty, student and parental concerns.

But what are the priorities when push comes to shove, as it frequently does in times of tight budgets or social change? Where do they learn and practice rationally prioritizing competing interests? Nowhere but on the job. Too, little; too late.

How do they learn to distinguish real problems from panicked misunderstandings, or political manipulations? They often don’t, except through painful on-the-job humiliations.

What training do new and even experienced administrators normally get for rationally justifying their decisions so they can rationally defend them, if necessary, in a variety of venues? Usually, none.

Can you really understand and practically apply the differences between what is or is not legal, ethical, reasonable, expedient or tactful? Many working administrators cannot.

I taught a course for more than ten years at Widener University called “Ethics and Values in Education.” My students were mostly practicing public school administrators working on their superintendency certification or a doctorate. Over the years the frequency with which my students were being dragged into court increased substantially.

They came to class with sad stories of embarrassment and humiliation at the hands of opposing council for things which they had done in good faith and in accordance with many of the constraints they were aware of. But they discovered they were clay pigeons even when school district counsel argued to protect them.

However, it isn’t too difficult and it doesn’t take years and years of study to prepare yourself to be assertively rational about why you decided to do what you did. The resources given below give examples of ethical, legal and other conflicts that could be handled with careful thinking.

See Ethical Argument, Practical Proposal


Cordially
--- EGR

Same-Sex Marriage: yes or no? A Hypocritical Confrontation?

You might just recall that someone once suggested, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Render unto God that which is God's." Following that advice we Americans might really separate Church from State and stop confusing two different situations: civil union and Holy Matrimony. Following the example of other countries we might leave Holy Matrimony up to the individuals concerned and to the (religious) community willing to recognize their bond as such.

Civil union should be solely a secular affair: let it deal with legal responsibilities, property, and privileges of worldly association. Whatever responsibilities and obligations Holy Matrimony entails should remain solely within the community that recognizes it and not involve the State in their enforcement. What the State should enforce is whatever the laws with respect to civil union entail.

Americans, like citizens of many other countries, should be required to go through an independent process of civil union, if they want the legal benefits of civil union for the matrimony their religious (or other) community recognizes.

So what's the argument about? It is little more than a distraction that diverts our attention from the fact that many Churches in the United States have traditionally used their secular influence to dip into the public treasury -- and into the pockets of others outside their congregations -- particularly by avoiding paying taxes, even when their "religious" activities compete with secular businesses. The way things work today, the State grants civil union privileges to the participants in matrimonial ceremonies of some -- but, prejudicially, not all -- religious communities. In the name of justice, that should be stopped. And those privileged denominations should be made to pay taxes besides.

If the Power Player churches who have traditionally exercised secular privileges would be forthright enough to say, "It is a truth of our Faith that those outside our congregation are rightly compelled to render their worldly possessions for our support," we might look less askance at their hypocrisy, even though such has been the Faith of every oppressor humankind has had the misfortune to experience.

For more on State-Church issues see, Religion, Intelligent Design and the Public Schools: serving God to Mammon?
.


Cordially,
-- EGR