Category Archives: Social Studies

‘A republic … if you can keep it’

San Francisco Chronicle: ‘A republic … if you can keep it’
– John Cooke, Marshall Croddy
Thursday, September 21, 2006

In 1787, shortly after the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman interested in the proceedings approached Benjamin Franklin. “Well, doctor,” she asked, “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” The venerable champion of American liberty replied, “A republic, madame, if you can keep it.”

As we celebrate Constitution Week (Sept. 17-23), it would be wise to heed Franklin’s challenge. A constitutional republic is not an easy form of government to maintain. It requires wise leaders more interested in the public good than in holding and using power. It requires an enlightened citizenry that understands and exercises its rights and duties and is willing to fight to preserve them. Moreover, both wise leaders and enlightened citizens must arise with each new generation, prepared and able to make the system work.

Nowhere is this more important than in California. California is the most diverse and multicultural of the 50 states. No single racial group composes a majority of the population and more than a quarter of the state’s residents were born in another country. In addition, California’s political system places high demands on its citizens.

From 2000 to 2006, California voters had to make decisions on some 90 state ballot propositions, and each year the electorate faces hundreds of city, county and community-college measures. California’s governments need engaged citizens who keep themselves informed about the issues, who vote and who participate in the public-policy process. California businesses need leaders and employees who know how to negotiate and compromise, work together to solve problems and make sound decisions.

Our state’s schools teach children to read and write, do math and use technology. So must schools educate the young about their constitutional heritage, the institutions and workings of government, and how to participate in a civil society as informed voters and as citizens committed to addressing the problems of their nation, state and communities. In short, California needs a world-class civics education for every pupil in every school.

Fortunately, we know what a quality civic education should look like. The Civic Mission of Schools, a report by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, identified educational practices that research shows are effective in developing knowledgeable and engaged citizens. Students need quality instruction in history, government and law. Pupils need the opportunity to discuss current events and issues and participate in service activities linked to school and community problems and to what they are studying in the classroom.

Students should get involved in extracurricular activities and have a voice in school governance. Finally, students should take part in classroom simulations, such as mock trials and legislative hearings, to experience how democratic institutions work in the real world.

California already has a history-driven social studies framework and standards for all grade levels, but it lacks a consistent and comprehensive focus on civics content. It also fails to adequately address the development of civic skills. All students must learn how to analyze and evaluate public policies, state and support reasoned opinions and work with others to solve problems.

We must make sure our students are adequately prepared to address the public-policy issues and challenges California will face in the 21st century. Now there is a lack of instruction time for civics, indeed all of the social studies, in many California elementary schools. Because, federal and state mandates and assessment programs require performance gains in language arts, math and science, many schools, especially those serving disadvantaged student populations, have sacrificed social studies instruction for more time on these subjects. Unfortunately, missing critical civics content, concepts and skill development in these early grades will make it difficult for these learners to achieve proficiency as they progress through middle- and high-school civics course work, and ultimately as adult citizens.

Math, reading and science are critical, but so are civics and social studies. Schools need our support! To best educate the next generation of California citizens will require using well- researched and proven classroom and school practices. We must offer teachers and administrators professional development opportunities and the materials that incorporate these educational practices as well as encourage schools to support and adopt them.

Assuring a world-class civics education for every California child is everyone’s responsibility. The California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools convened by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, in collaboration with the Center for Civic Education and nearly 100 civic and educational organizations, is working with public officials, legislators, educators, business leaders, legal professionals, parents and everyday citizens to strengthen civic education throughout the state.

Let’s make sure our generation responds to Franklin’s challenge. Our response must be: “Don’t worry, Dr. Franklin, we will keep your republic.”

John Cooke is the chairman of the advisory committee of the California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools; Marshall Croddy is director of programs at the Constitutional Rights Foundation.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/09/21/EDG6PKDTQQ1.DTL

Hollywood’s attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise

The Guardian: On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men
Hollywood’s attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise

Slavoj Zizek
Monday September 11, 2006
The Guardian

Two Hollywood films mark 9/11’s fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of “cognitive mapping” is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That’s the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as “subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda”. The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one’s government: when under attack, one just has to do one’s duty.

This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.
The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August’s alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events – where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves – open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the “happy 90s”, the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history”, the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a “fire in the minds of men”, the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: “The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses.” What Bush didn’t grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire.

· Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, szizek@yahoo.com

The Detroit News: $5M gift to build Cranbrook girls school

Detroit Free Press: MONEY WOES: District is reeling from debt, falling enrollment