Introductory
Comments
Human moral standards vary over time and
are still a work in progress.
Political and social arrangements follow
the prevailing moral ethos at a particular time in history.
Until the late 17th century, monarchical
rule, including the expanded imperial form of hereditary governance, prevailed
over much of the globe. Simpler village,
village cluster, and clan organization characterized other societies in islands
of the great oceans and in areas that remained remote from global interaction
and competition; but these societies,
too, became swept up in imperial systems as political entities of formidable
military power took aim at peoples previously living distantly from the
interacting world.
Britain’s dramatic national ruckus of
1688-1689, dubbed the “Glorious Revolution,” brought enhanced power to Parliament
and thenceforth asserted the advantages of limiting monarchical power. John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government served as theoretical inspiration for
that power shift; in the 18th
century, Montesquieu would posit the advantages of three-branch governance,
with a judiciary positioned equally alongside executive and legislative bodies.
In the Declaration
of Independence, Thomas Jefferson maintained Locke’s idea of “life” and
“liberty” as natural rights while changing “property” to “the pursuit of
happiness.” In the United States Constitution, James Madison also wrote under the
inspiration of Locke and incorporated Montesquieu’s three-branch organizational
principal, with a central government much more powerful than had been the case
with the ephemeral Articles of
Confederation but nevertheless conferring notable prerogatives on state and
local governments, and on the “people.”
But composition of the “people” was only
very slowly expansive:
Jefferson and Madison were guilty and
ideologically conflicted slave-owners who for pecuniary reasons lived with
their guilt. Andrew Jackson was a
slaveholding abuser of Native Americans who nevertheless expanded the
electorate to include white men of humble means. These imperfect promoters of democracy
created a system that by 1865-1877 was capable of including men of all
ethnicities as formal citizens; but territorial
acquisition and political compromise negated the value of the formality, so
that not for another century would a judicial, executive, and legislative
consensus form that Native Americans, African Americans, and white women should
gain full human dignity, with legal recourse when traditional societal attitudes
conflicted with statutory and constitutional law.
Those traditional attitudes, including
those of particular racial and sexist virulence, had major moments of reassertion
from the 1980s into this very year of 2020.
Of a sudden, though, abuse of people according to ethnic and gender
identification seems no longer acceptable to a majority of the now greatly
expanded citizenry.
But a tenacious minority clings to
prejudice as a guiding principle for life and will not fade in the absence of an
effective combination of persuasive and punitive measures.
Both those who have embraced the expanded
notion of citizenship and those maintaining reactionary stances mostly dwell in
abject ignorance as to history, government, and natural science.
Only the overhaul of K-12 education can maximize
the possibility that social and political advancement can proceed so that persuasive
measures exceed punitive, and so that the future may be envisioned on the basis
of fact and shared ethics, rather on the ethos of illogic and moral morass
describing our national condition in 2020.
The needed overhaul must begin at the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
For that to happen, fundamentally good
people are going to have to behave better.
To behave better, leaders at the
Minneapolis Public Schools are going to have to discover heretofore untapped sources
of courage and action.
This July 2020 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution shows
these good people the root of the dilemma and the route to the sources.
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