Excellent article on what's wrong with Social Studies in K-12.
Issues Needing Attention In Social Studies
Exclusive commentary by Nancy Salvato
The Washington Dispatch
Jan 8, 2004
One of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, admonished that education "enables every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom." This warning is extremely important to heed today because our students are faced with a number of problems in the field of education that are undermining their ability as citizens to understand the forces that would “secure or endanger” the United States. Ignorant people simply cannot make such judgments. This educational problem is surely weakening America.
Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? is a fabulous collection of essays from the Fordham foundation which makes a comprehensive analysis of the major issues that face the field of Social Studies. Because I am in absolute agreement with what is expounded upon in this compilation, I have given a brief synopsis of what these experts in the field have to say about the specific problems that must be addressed in order to teach for democracy.
The first issue lies within the information being taught in our classrooms. As part of a basic social studies curriculum, students should be taught why the United States is worth fighting for; and how earlier generations responded to attacks against this country. They should also be taught about the idea of freedom. Sadly, within the last 50 years it has become unacceptable to teach nationalism. However, in my opinion (as well as many others) it is extremely important to educate for democracy! We cannot take our system of government for granted. We must educate our citizens to understand the importance of this country’s political vision of freedom and equality before the law. We need to foster in each generation loyalty to the political institution our Founders created.
At first glance, multiculturalism would seem to be a good way to educate our citizens about the different ethnic backgrounds and values that make up our society and the rest of the world. This would go far toward eradicating unease about which is different from oneself and fostering amity, as well as building an understanding of the contributions that each of these groups have made toward civilization. But inherent in this educational practice is a phenomenon that holds our own culture to a higher standard and at the same time ignores much of the failings of other cultures. We should be able to look critically at the problems in our society but we should be able to look honestly at the flaws of other societies as well. When teaching about other cultures, texts offer superficial information about clothing styles, food, holidays, religious observances, leisure activities, rituals, and other customs to provide a sense of difference and to "celebrate diversity," without much context to give them real meaning. Rarely do the editors of our textbooks include objectionable information about other cultures like female circumcision, slavery in Sudan, China's one-child policies, or religious discrimination.
The second issue is the idea that Social Studies is so devalued as subject matter in our schools that it is not even tested as part of NCLB. How well history, geography, or most importantly civics is being taught will not be held publicly accountable, and everyone in education knows that what gets tested is what gets taught.
The trend to discount the importance of history seems to have begun with the progressive education movement. This has had a substantial effect on teaching in general and specifically in social studies beginning when history was eliminated as a subject for study in the elementary schools. The NEA began the process of replacing history as a core subject back in 1918 when it decided that the goal of social studies was good citizenship and that historical studies that did not contribute to social change had no value. Educational theorists believed the schools mission is to socialize their students by centering their activities on home, family, neighborhood, and community. They said that the schools should teach the present, not the past. One state after another began to eliminate history from the elementary grades and to replace it with expanding environments.
Expanding environments is the basic curriculum that most states, textbook companies, and curriculum leaders have used to organize elementary (K-6) social studies for nearly 75 years. Every year elementary students are exposed to a slowly widening social environment beginning with the self and home (kindergarten) and leading to families (1st grade), neighborhoods (2nd), communities (3rd), state (4th), country (5th), and ending with world (6th). While this approach appears to provide an organized curricular sequence, many educators have criticized expanding environments for its lack of substantive content knowledge. The first three years, for example, are simply repetition, since the family, neighborhood, and community are topics children know before coming to school. It has been suggested that Expanding Environments trivializes social studies in the first three grades and limits the curriculum to persons and institutions directly relevant to the student rather than introducing historical figures, significant events, meaningful achievements, and diverse cultures. This curriculum doesn’t establish a foundation for later study of history, heroes, struggles, victories, and defeats.
This nationwide curriculum is based on the idea that children can only understand the environment nearest in time and space to their personal experiences. This ignores the reality that media exposure increases a child's experiential base. In addition, if this organizational approach was applied to science education it would dictate that children should learn about cockroaches rather than dinosaurs since bugs are closer to their experience base and children are limited in their ability to comprehend subjects that are far removed in time and space. Obviously, this isn’t the way children are exposed to science concepts so why has it been adopted for social studies?
The goal of No Child Left Behind is to raise the expectations for learning in our schools. Although there is no detailed outline explaining how to achieve this in the individual classroom, it can be noted that progressive teaching techniques have had the opposite effect in many schools across the nation. The result has often been referred to as “dumbing down” our classrooms. Accountability will require colleges, universities, and public schools to reexamine this progressive approach. They will have to admit that more often than not techniques such as cooperative learning are unsuccessful because high achievers end up being used as free labor to bring up low achievers. “Multiple Intelligences Theory” has been misused because of claims such as slam-dunking a basketball being equal in brainpower to performing open-heart surgery that do not take into account the overall value to society. Many of our students are having serious problems with literacy yet national English standards consider "media-viewing" as an equal skill to reading and writing, without taking into account how “useful” this skill is compared to the other two. Standards for admission into honors courses have in many cases been eliminated and even more often ability grouping and gifted programs have been abandoned altogether in favor of lowest-common-denominator education. Last but not least, "full inclusion" of behavior-disordered and severely learning disabled students in regular class-rooms (called mainstreaming) has been extremely disruptive to the education of the majority of students in the classroom.
Progressive teaching doesn’t recognize that the fact base that that must be disseminated to students when studying history is often best established through lecture but lectures are considered taboo because they are categorized as a teacher rather than student centered teaching style. Subsequently, Social Studies teachers are not trained in the techniques of lecture. Student teachers are taught how to create student centered learning environments. This causes problems for beginning teachers because they are not well prepared to teach social studies or history. They are taught how to write an objective. If they are lucky, they know some of the state's social studies standards. They might understand Piaget's stages of cognitive development and Bloom's Taxonomy.
New teachers are overwhelmed as they come to realize that their students come to class every day, five days a week. Middle school encore teachers and high school teachers often see over 100 students each day. Progressive classroom heterogeneously group students so that all have “equal access” to education. Teachers have to figure out how to make students stay in their seats, participate in cooperative learning groups— especially those whose members are hand picked by the teacher. Some students misbehave, other students sit quietly, using social studies time to finish their math assignments because math is more important (remember, NCLB doesn’t hold schools accountable for social studies). Many don’t do any work at all. Today’s teachers are expected to provide leadership, subject knowledge, and classroom order in an environment set up to fail. The student centered teaching methods they have been taught are simply not adequate when faced with real world teaching.
It is time to realize that it was a mistake to favor progressive education techniques and its bi-product “political correctness” over traditional learning methods that require reading, memorization, teacher led discussion, and application in the study of history. These problems have undermined our ability as citizens to understand the forces that would “secure or endanger” the United States. Teachers need to be able to teach for democracy. It’s bigger than NCLB. It’s a matter of preserving our way of life.
If you would like to read more about these issues go to: edexcellence.net
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Nancy Salvato is a middle school teacher in Illinois and an independent contractor for Prism Educational Consulting. She is the Educational Liaison to IL Sen. Ray Soden and she works as the 6th Congressional District Coordinator for the Center for Civic Education for “We The People”, and “Project Citizen” instructional programs funded by the United States Department of Education by act of Congress. She is a columnist for American Daily, and TheRant.us. Her pieces are published in The Washington Dispatch, and various other sites.
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