Good article about what a disaster SS has become in K-12.
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Why Doesn't Johnny Vote?
Blame it on social studies.
BY BRENDAN MINITER WSJ.com
Monday, September 29, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Social studies, depressingly, is the course Americans students do not want to take. Beginning in the 1970s--and in an apparently irreversible trend--the education establishment downsized history and the like into dull-witted subjects, gutted of all passion and focused on seemingly value-free events. Heroes? Pooh! Nationalism? Bah! Western civilization? You've gotta be kidding!
Yet the Sept. 11 attacks may have changed all that. A nation at war--one compelled to ask existential questions of itself and of others--has begun to rediscover the courage, the conviction and the energy long said to be dead in America.
While education reform has focused on more structural fixes like school choice, there is now also a movement to reform the substance in the classroom--in particular the curriculum taught in social-studies classes. Tireless reformers have long sought to get back to the basics in the teaching of history, civics and geography; but there's a sense of urgency now, one that has brought us "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?"--a collection of essays recently published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Liberal educators should take this book as a warning: The groundwork for reform is now being laid. Their pedagogical world--complacent in its unchallenged political correctness--may be about to be shaken up.
It's about time. After the terror attacks it was clear that educators had fallen far out of step with the rest of country. The National Council of the Social Studies designed a curriculum that urged teachers to stress "tolerance," and as its first lesson recommended looking at the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. While Americans were flying flags, a speaker at the council's annual meeting--only a few months after the attacks--warned against singing patriotic songs like "God Bless America."
While disconcerting, this behavior is hardly new. Fordham's essayists suggest points in the 1920s and '30s for when social studies first turned down the wrong path. It likely began with the promise of efficiency in stripping out "useless" information for children of factory workers who would never go on to intellectual careers. A body of ideas was then constructed on how best to teach social studies--and an elite has patronized our children ever since.
The new social studies often rests on "student-centered instruction" which allows students to be their own learning guides. The starting premise is that students can learn only what is familiar and directly relevant to them. Thus social studies in kindergarten through the third grade teaches students first about family, then local public servants like firemen and policemen. It also holds that members of a racial minority aren't immediately capable of learning about people who are of a different race, so black kids read about the Great Zimbabwe kingdom, not Columbus. This concentric-circle approach leaves students unprepared for serious analysis. But mostly, students find it boring. To combat boredom, teachers use pictures, videos, music and other "hands on" tools to displace reading and writing. We might call it dumbing-down.
All of this serves a larger purpose. Social-studies theorists seek to create social activists. Students need not know the facts to be effective change-agents; they're taught that facts are a matter of opinion. Indeed, they need only believe that they are correct as they reject the tenets of society. The result? Elementary-school lessons that use Thanksgiving to teach that we owe redress to American Indians.
The results have been disastrous. Young Americans are ignorant of history and are increasingly poor citizens (old-fashioned term!). The percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted fell to 32% in 1996 and 2000, from 50% in 1972. A study in 2000 found that only 28.1% of college freshman kept up to date with politics, a record low and down from 60.3% in 1966. "The current generation of young people may set a new standard for both civic disengagement and civic misinformation," writes J. Martin Rochester in his Fordham essay.
Rather than just indict social studies, Fordham's authors offer solutions. Principal among them is to recognize that facts have an objective basis, and aren't mainly a matter of opinion. They add that students respond well to knowledge-based education and are capable of understanding historical perspectives that are different than their own experiences--they can think outside their own skin.
So learning about oneself is not a self-contained exercise. It involves the study of one's society and country--of history. Even, dare we say it, of heroes.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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