ANN
BIANCHETTI
Diary #8
Civics
Education:
Examining Moral Dilemmas
I recently read an essay called "What Happened to My American Dream" by Nathalie Neptune. The essay relates the story of an immigrant teen-ager's discomfort at facing the reality of racism in some parts of America. It raised several questions for me about what it means to be a citizen and to teach "citizenship."
Neptune is an immigrant from Haiti, an illegal immigrant. She does not want to become an American citizen after learning about the Abner Louima case. Louima, an illegal Haitian immigrant was brutalized by New York City police. The police officers were found guilty of the brutalization and of racial motivations for the abuse. I began to think about using Neptune's essay in class. How would students respond to this? I think it would depend a lot on what students you ask. Immigrant students would probably react differently than non-immigrant students and minority students may react differently than white students. Perhaps I felt some of what students might feel if they read this: a little bit of anger. As I read Neptune's words I couldn't help think, "Here is a person who came to this country to get out of a bad situation in hers. She doesn't want to return. Living in America does offer benefits to Neptune: education, jobs, and freedom. She wants the rights and benefits without having to take on the responsibilities of American citizenship." Neptune cites civil unrest, lack of freedom and limited economic opportunities as her reasons for immigrating. She doesn't seem to realize that becoming a citizen does not imply blanket acceptance of wrongdoing by others in our society. I consider myself a loyal American, yet I do not support many things our government does. Our system is one that asks those who receive its benefits to also shoulder its responsibilities: loyalty, voting, obedience to our laws, or respectful, non-violent protest against laws we believe are unjust. Most civics curriculums stress the "rights and responsibilities" of citizens, not "the free ride of citizens and non-citizens." Who is an American? I began to reflect on my teaching about immigration. I asked myself if I had allowed my personal views to enter into it. I also began to think about just what civics education should be. What is "teaching for democracy?" What does teaching to educate citizens really mean? I begin my Civics class each year with a unit entitled "Who is an American?" In this unit my students and I explore the concept of ethnicity in America. To form a foundation for our debates, we begin with U.S. immigration laws. We learn about the Immigration and Naturalization Service, about quotas on immigrants, about current immigration policy and pending laws. We also read recent newspaper articles on immigrants, including one from New Jersey about students kicked out of their school for being illegal immigrants. We access www.congress.org to research various representatives' positions on immigration. We then analyze the media: newspapers, magazines (like Seventeen, Teen, Bop, People), movies (we watch clips of American History X, The Scarlet Letter, Do the Right Thing, and whatever teen movie is currently on video) and certain TV shows for hidden messages. Who is an American according to this script or director? What is the message in the movie about acceptance of differences in America? Who is represented more, ethnically, in most mainstream media? Why do you think that is? How do you think that affects the public's perception of who is an American? After our facts foundation and media analysis, we turn to debate. We focus on welfare reform, the rights of illegal immigrants, and the justice or injustice of immigration laws. It is interesting to see the different voices that emerge from my eighth grade students. Some years it is an even balance of those who want to grant illegal immigrants rights equivalent to those held by citizens and those who don't think that's fair. Some years it is tipped to one side or another. Last year, after 9/11, I was just beginning this unit. Understandably, I had a large number of students who said illegal immigrants should have no rights and should, in fact, be deported when found. It was a wonderful teachable moment to examine how fear and "current events" affects public opinion on immigration. We made ties to the Japanese internment in World War II and the Irish discrimination in the nineteenth century. This year we are back to a more balanced set of opinions. My student's views are also influenced by their minority status and the fact that many of their parents are immigrants, some legal and some not. Learning to think for themselves Of course I have my own views – on immigration and many other topics I teach. What point of view should a teacher take on political issues in the classroom? I think none. In middle school, students are very impressionable. Many students will base their opinions on what their teachers say. Teachers have a huge responsibility not to influence their students with their own political agendas. The classroom is no place for stumping. My students incessantly ask me, "What do you think, Ms. B?" with a sense of "tell me what to think" implied (I touched on this topic in Diary 5). They want to know "the real story" from me after we read articles in the paper. After we read the transcript of President Bush's speech on war in Iraq and were debating its points, they kept asking, "Is what he says true, Ms. B?" and "Who is right, the U.N. or America?" At that point, I needed to keep silent about my views and let them explore different perspectives on the issue and make up their own minds. Educating citizens for a democracy means teaching them to think for themselves, not encouraging them to mindlessly buy into the political views of friends or authority figures. Teaching through moral dilemmas So what is quality civic education and how should it be taught?Lawrence Kohlberg suggests that moral reasoning is the key to effective civic education and participation. He defines moral education as teaching students how to think critically about "universal principles of justice." Students should learn to make important decisions based on these universal principles, he says, rather than conventional principles, which he describes as situation-based and imposed by an outside force or rules/laws. Kohlberg believes that students must engage moral dilemmas in order to move on to the next stage of moral development. He is quick to point out that moral education presented this way is different from values clarification exercises which give no right 'moral' answer. Kohlberg's theory is that simply by reasoning out solutions to dilemmas (the classic "stealing medicine to save a life" is one example), students will naturally move to the next stage as they hear reasoning from others in the group who are at the next higher stage.
I agree with Kohlberg that moral reasoning is vital in civic education. A democracy depends on it. Our Constitution is an example. The crafters of the Constitution -- James Madison, in particular -- were experts at moral reasoning. They were able to see the other side of arguments and arrive at compromises that allowed the document and the country to flourish. Students, too, must be able to morally reason their way into decisions and choices. In our immigration debate they wrestled with very real moral issues that affected their or their parents' lives.
Learning
from the process
In his associationist theory for civic education, John Dewey suggests
that the way to teach democracy is to teach how to live together, balancing
one's actions to satisfy one's individual needs with the needs of one's
society. We need to learn to live together, Dewey says, for "Šdemocracy
is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated
living, of conjoint communicated experience."
