Who Would Know Better Than Today’s Youth?

America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare

This article is reflecting on James Madison’s view on factions from his Federalist papers — specifically Federalist 10 — and how his fears are playing out in the age of modern technology. This article does well in providing the background on James Madison’s advisories against factions and their potentially dangerous qualities. It goes into detail how Madison believed that factions were an unfavorable yet natural tendency of society, but to dissolve them would mean an end to democracy. During the creation of the Federalists papers, Madison was very familiar with the latest technology — newspaper. He expressed that even though newspapers spread information quickly, hence feeding into the recklessness of factions, that people would take the time to read them and evaluate the information given. Leap forward to 2018, and the spread of information is instant and very few people take the time to carefully scrutinize what they are reading on social media. Ultimately, we have created a world of factions that Madison never could have foreseen. Which poses the question of how we should view factions through the lense of the twenty-first century.

Before reading this article, my students would be familiar with James Madison’s Federalist 10, which would hopefully lead them to ask questions such as:

• Are factions more prevalent today than they were during the founding of the country?
• Are factions more dangerous now because the can form more quickly, or less dangerous because people are interacting online versus face-to-face?
• How might political polarization affect factions? Are you seeing more groups or less groups?
• What would Madison say if he could rewrite Federalist 10 for our current time?

The Grand Challenges that this article connects to are:

Understanding the American Experience

• Use material culture and documentary collections to research and interpret national milestones and achievements; American life and national identity, cultural expression, and achievements in science and technology; political struggles; economic, scientific, technological, and cultural innovations; and leaders that have defined the United States and the character of its people.
• Conduct research on contemporary American life and creativity.

Valuing World Cultures

• Shed light on the interconnections among world cultures.

Montana Social Studies Content Standard 1: Students access, synthesize, and evaluate information to communicate and apply social studies knowledge to real world situations.

End of Grade 8: 2. assess the quality of information (e.g., primary or secondary sources, point of view and embedded values of the author).

Montana Social Studies Content Standard 4: Students demonstrate an understanding of the effects of time, continuity, and change on historical and future perspectives and relationships.

Upon Graduation — End of Grade 12: 5. analyze both the historical impact of technology (e.g., industrialization, communication, medicine) on human values and behaviors and how technology shapes problem solving now and in the future.

For part of this lesson I would love to include a Questionnaire as mentioned in 50 Routines. After reading both Federalist 10 and the Medium article, we would break into groups and discuss the ideas behind Madison and the Medium article. From there, I would allow all of my students to open up facebook — yes, facebook. There job as a team is to find political articles — one from a liberal news source, one from a conservative, and any other posts that would classify as a “faction” opinion. After a few minutes (I would be walking around the classroom monitoring) they would go to the board and write the article titles that they found. We would discuss as a class what everyone found. From there we would go back to individual seating and I would hand out a questionnaire. I would have prompts such as, Are the articles you found produced by a “faction” and is that faction a reliable source? Why or why not? I would include statements that require a response of strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and students would have to defend their opinions. Statements might include, factions are a necessary part of democracy, our government protects us from the rise of factions, Factions are the same now as they were in the 1700s. After completing the questionnaire class would end with a discussion of everyone’s responses.