THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL SKILLS

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL SKILLS

(Book: Education for Responsible Citizenship, year: 1977, by: Frank Brown, page 37-40)

Abstract and general knowledge abaout the polity is one thing; the skills and attitudes needed to make the polity work are something else. Schools and colleges do not do well at conveying the knowledge. On the matter of skill development, they are woefully deficient. How can the American society educate future generations of leaders (hundreds of thousands of them) and future generations of informed and critical followers (millions of them) to haave the herat, the brains, and the guts to think and to behave responsibily as political beings? James Thurber coutioned people not to look backward in anger, not forward in fear, but around in awareness. Bay and large this advice has not been heeded. Schools and colleges have done little in identifying the skills, mental attitudes, moral philosophies, and social commitments needed for the survival of democratic values-perhaps even for the survival of the species.

Educational administrators and teachers do not lack the desire to be helpful in the socialization process. Considerable time and attention have been given by schools to the inculcation of attitudes of patriotism and tolerance and to the underlying political philosophies of our constitutional system. The best of America’s schools, colleges, and universities have stimulated an honest social criticism that has had an important and healthy influence on both foreign affariss and recent domestic events. But when past and present educational practice is measured against present and future national and international need, an enormous educational gap becomes obvious. Educators have almost totally ignored the development of social anf political skills, without which even sophisticated attitudes and compendious knowledge are inutile.

What are these social and political skills, and how can they be tought pr learned? First, Amerika needs minds that have skills of relating one thing to another, of seeing connections. Dictionaries contain an uncommon but useful word: “syndetic,” meaning” connecting” or” connective”-the capacity to encompass relationships. Syndetic skills are absolutely essential. There is a compelling need to develop syndetic courses and exercises that force students to look for connections-connections between the runoff of farm fertilizers and the death of Lake Erie; connections betweenthe mideast political crisis and the price gasoline in peoria; connections among drought in the Middle West, soviet economic priorities, and starvation in india; connections between gadgetry and pollution; connection between corruption and inflation; connections between prejudice and domestic crime.

Only if citizens have some clear conception of the complex ingredients of social couation, and of the probabilistic rather than the certain nature of social choices, will they develop the capacity to solve the problems that beset the nation the word, or eveb to live stoically with the maddening trade-offs that are not easily amenable to social manipulation. Much of America’s scholastic and collegiate curriculum needs to be reexamined to see where and how new knowledge can be introduced that forces students increasingly to reckon with complex interdependencies. Educators have long sensed this need; but in view of the probable future, the responses have been insufficient in both quality and number.

Second, the educational system needs to turn out generations of negotiators. The past few centuries of Western history have seen a secular weathering down of the great peaks of despotism symbolized by terms in like “divine right” or “absolute monarchy”. Orders do not suffice in a world of manifold epicenters of power. In a world of 150 separate nations, myriad provincial and local authorities, thens of thousands of multinational and subnational economic entities, hundreds of professional and scientific guilds, and an immense variety of artisan trades, horizonta-not vertical-communications are the condition of cooperation. Who is willing any longer to be at the beck and call of either a domineering employer or sovereign, or even a condescending patron? J.H. Elliott reminded us that this new relationship was symbolized as far back as the early sixteenth century by the anxious attemps of that “normally headstrong Pope, Jilius II, to calm down the equally irascible Michelangelo and induce him to return to Rome to paint the Sistine ceiling ... the mere artist and the spiritual ruler of Christendom now met on equal terms.”

And so it is no matter where one turns. Nobody in his right mind orders a plumber around. The United States does not order the Soviet Union around. The president of General Motors does not order the president of the United Automobile Workers around.

If common purposes are to be achieved in a world of often willful autonomies, legitimate authority must be coupled with skills of negotiation. These skills involve rhetorical abilities in the Aristotelian sense-the ability to persuade (note the comment of Aristotle’s great teacher, Plato: “Persuasion, not coercion, is the divine element in the world”). Beyond rhetoric, the negotiating skill also involves both the subtleties and psychic resiliencies associated with the ability to resolve or to defuse conflicts-to talk people down from their “highs” of anger and mistrust. Negotiating also involves the most essential of all political talents: the capacity to bargain, to discover areans of agreement, and to deal ( in the nonpejorative sense).

Except for limited opportunities in student government, educations does litlle to prepare young people for the negotiating skills they will need to perform their civic obligations-let alone for the mundane realities of personal and occupational coping. American education needs to create a new facet ti the curriculum- a facet that James Coleman would call “action rich”-which exercises regularly the negotiating abilities of young people. Through simulation, role playing, games, in basket techniques, modified T-groups, and through real participation in the governance of appropriate school and college activities, young people must train their diplomatic muscles. Negotiating skills are the underlying political necessity, not just showing young people how to pull a voting lever.

This necessity for negotiating skills confronts some hardy values that are deeply implanted in the American psyche from childhood on. Americans put a high value on winning; but negotiating implies the value of settling equitably and fairly with no winners in the traditional egocentric sense. Futhermore, negotiating suggests not compromise, and Americans are reared to believe that one should not compromise between right and wrong. The oversimplifications of these bimodal moral perceptions tend to reject the very essence of American political process. In a universe of conflict and multiplicity of values, if two people disagree, neither need be wicked. This nation mast have an enormous pool of skilled negotiators if its citizens are to have world peace and domestic tranquility. Equally important, there must exist a general population prepared to accept negotiated settlements of tough and emotion-laden issues.