Educating Techno-Savvy Cynics: The American Government Challenge

Video Presentation
Conference Discussion

Contemporary college students are tuned out and turned off from politics. Survey and behavioral data clearly indicate they fail to follow political news and increasingly eschew participation in basic political activities such as voting. There is much to be cynical about. The litany of real world events such as Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Zippergate, and Impeachment have affected our students directly or through their parents and teachers. At least some of the blame falls on our shoulders. Cynicism sells, and we use it almost unconsciously in our classrooms. Throw away lines such as having Athe best Congress money can buy,@ or references to our Aphilanderer-in-chief@ are guaranteed at least a titter, if not a full blown rumbling of laughter.

At a minimum, we have the responsibility to help our students understand the sources of their own cynicism and its consequences. Cynicism is politically debilitating. If one believes Ayou can=t fight city hall,@ there is a very high probability you won=t try. Politics is not a spectator sport. Politicians and the political process rewards those who use their involvement to set the agenda, frame alternatives, and force preferred choices. Someone will do these tasks, and by not participating, the cynic abandons the playing field to those who will. The image of America politics as fixed political game completely dominated by money, well-endowed interest groups and/or a small group of self-serving partisans is a significant overstatement. There is still room from relatively average citizens like Candy Lightner the founder of MADD, Rosa Parks who ignited the modern civil rights movement, or Gregory Watson the college student who almost single-handedly got the 27^th Amendment (limiting pay increases for members of Congress) passed. (For their stories and those of over twenty other citizen-activists, see Stephen Frantzich, CITIZEN POLITICS: POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN A CYNICAL AGE, Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming, August, 1999).

Our task lies in creating healthy skeptics who recognize the significant challenge of moving the political system, but who leave our classes with the spark of interest to make a difference and with the tools for putting their ideas into practice.

THE EDUCATIONAL GOAL

Effective education is an awesome challenge requiring its practitioners to overcome obstacles, to recognize the difference between education and training, to clarify the differences between facts and values, and find the proper balance between emphasizing facts and skills.

Most educators enjoy learning and choose a discipline whose substance they inherently like and at which they excel. Our students often have less inherent motivation and differing skills from out own. We have chosen the systemaic study of politics for life, most of our students have a limited commitment to it for one semester. Graduate education emphasizes substance and research techniques resulting in most pedagogical skills being acquired through unstructured observation or osmosis. We march into the classroom ready to Aprofess@ without a clearly thought out mega-strategy for each course or a clearly objectives for each class period.

While we claim to be educators, we often fall back on a training mode. Training and education differ widely. Training involves habituation and the development of routines through memorization, drill and practice. Training is a legitimate goal for many tasks, but rewarding students for memorizing terms and regurgitating definitions is not education. Large classes with multiple-choice exams often evaluate success by using assessment tools more applicable to a training mode. Education is individuating more than standardizing. It is an attempt to get students to use substantive knowledge in new ways to apply concepts, predict future states and to evaluate outcomes. In other words, it encourages THINKING. The agenda of a good educator is not to get his or her students to think like he or she does, but rather to think for themselves. Education is a subversive activity, encouraging students to take the opinions and facts they absorbed uncritically from parents , teachers and previous learning and to analyze them, evaluate them and take them back on boardBoften in a revised formB as their own. The effective educator stimulates the process by asking the tough questions, monitoring sloppy analysis, and fostering an atmosphere in which meaningful questioning and reconstruction can take place. Without personal ownership, the learning of facts is a shallow and almost meaningless exercise.

Our students ought to be passionate about what they believe and what they know, while recognizing the limits of knowledge and personal preferences. Believing one knows everything and that one=s preferences are beyond question is as bad as knowing and believing in nothing.

A first step lies in making sure students can distinguish between facts and values. Facts are provable truths over which an almost universal consensus develops. Values are personal preferences as to how the world should work. Each serve as the basis for behavior. While not all values are equally desirable or useful, students must learn that politics by definition deals with those values over which reasonable people can disagree.

As an educator dealing with politics, I don=t care whether my students emerge as little liberals or little conservatives, as long as they recognize the differences, have good personal reasons for their choices, and recognize the personal and societal consequences of their choice.

The American Government class is often a service course designed to provide students with a basic toolbox of necessary factual information and intellectual devices upon which they can build. Service courses are under particular pressure to accommodate each new wave of perceived educational shortcomings. The increasing demands on higher education to go beyond teaching substance alone have forced the American government course to at least consider contributing to skill-oriented initiatives such as writing across the curriculum, ethics across the curriculum, critical thinking, cooperative learning, computer literacy, video literacy and the like. Experience is clear that skills are best taught in substantive context. While each of these more skill-related goals is valuable and all are applicable to teaching American government, course content is to a large extent a zero-sum game of inclusion and exclusion. In the extreme case, substance can get lost in the teaching of tools and techniques, raising the question AWhere=s the beef?@

Just as it is possible to go too far in sacrificing content to skill development, it is also possible to emphasize content too much. Education is not a process of filling one=s intellectual bag with definitions and facts. In each of our courses, we should self-consciously strike a balance between content and the development of intellectual skills.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

Technology will not make a bad teacher good, but it could make a good teacher better. The very fact that you are participating in this virtual conference marks you as a high potential misuser of technology. In the research realm, Abraham Kaplan discussed the ALaw of the Instrument,@ which in practical terms can be described as Agive a child a hammer and the whole world becomes a nail.@ New technologies, whether in research or teaching often fall victim to misuse and overuse. The corollary of the Law of the Instrument is the ALaw of the Least Appropriate Target,@ which can be summed up as Agive a child a hammer and they will hit the glass top table before they will hit the block of wood with the nail in it.@ New tools are often misapplied before they are applied effectively. Just because a technology exists, there is no requirement to use it. The introduction of a new technology into a course should be DEMAND DRIVEN rather than supply driven. The instructor must ask the question, Awhat does this new technology allow me to do that I otherwise could not do.@ That question must be open to regular faculty and student evaluation. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to use something other than the centuries old chalk and talk lecture.

Before using a video clip, putting one=s syllabus on a Web page, initiating an e-mail discussion group, or instituting one of a variety of new technologies, it important to justify to yourself that the approach promises some additional value. Those of us who fall toward the high end of the technology junkie scale are highly susceptible to allowing form to override substance. We need to make sure that the technology is neither a crutch or an impediment to what we do. Be assured that if we don=t ask the tough questions about teaching methodologies, others will--and those others are likely to be less--forgiving members of promotion and tenure committees.

I am fully convinced that the judicious and well-thought out use of new technology is fully justified. Our televison/computer-oriented students can often be reached more effectively with new technology. Even if our ultimate goal is to excite them to the joy of reading books, deconstructing original texts or absorbing lecture material, we need to meet them where they are rather than simply dismissing them for the shortcomings we perceive.

THE JOY OF FACILITATING LEARNING

While posted on a Ateaching@ Web site, our emphasis should be on LEARNING rather than teaching. The teaching terminology implies too much of a focus on the teacher. While the teacher shirks responsibility by not being in charge, the ultimate goal of learning requires more of a cooperative effort. At a minimum, a teacher who wants to facilitate learning needs to take the individual students into account, evaluating their current skills, learning modes, knowledge base and motivation. Research indicates that for most material active learning techniques trump passive, varied techniques within a class hour trump straight lecture or discussion, flexibility trumps slavish accomplishment of a pre-determined lesson plan, and that treating students as valued fellow learners trumps the advantage of maintaining the teacher=s infallible status. The era of the teacher as the on-way conduit of information --if such an approach was ever effective-- pales in terms of effectiveness and necessary EFFORT, compared to the role of the teacher as a learning coach with a personal stake in facilitating the greatest amount of learning.