Social StudieS Education, History of

The reports of the National Education Association's (NEA) Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Schools (CRSE) called for the social studies as an integrated area of study in secondary schools in 1916. As part of that commission, the NEA had created a separate Committee on the Social Studies whose members defined the area as comprising subjects with content related to the development of human society. Examples of such subjects included history, geography, economics, and political science. According to this report, the aim of the social studies was to cultivate good citizenship. Although the members of the committee wanted students to develop loyalty to their cities, their states, and to their nation, they hoped the students would temper such narrow patriotism with a sense of membership in a world community.

A similar set of ideas had appeared in 1893 when the Madison Conference described courses appropriate for high schools as part of the reports of the NEA's Committee of Ten. When the members of the Madison Conference considered how teachers should arrange the students' assignments, they recommended that teachers allow the students to study topics that interested them and challenged them to solve problems. These ideas reappeared in the reports of the American Historical Association's [Page 799](AHA) Committee of Seven that surveyed practices of secondary school history teachers in 1899, and in the AHA's Committee of Eight that released its report about teaching history in elementary schools in 1909.

The similarities among these reports about school studies derived from the fact that areas of professional study such as history underwent significant changes. For example, James Harvey Robinson called for a new history that encouraged readers to learn about the ways the world changed. Robinson complained that historians tended to compile accurate but mind-numbing lists of names of minor royal figures, dates of insignificant battles, and details of peace treaties. To bring life to the study of history, Robinson urged historians to include the work of anthropologists, novelists, economists, and sociologists in ways that would help readers understand the development of present conditions. These ideas and those of Robinson's like-minded colleagues, such as Albert Bushnell Hart, appeared in the report of the Committee of Ten because Robinson attended the Madison Conference and his ideas of the new history dominated the 1916 report of the Committee on the Social Studies.

Despite the NEA's pleas for social studies to be socially relevant, Harold Rugg complained in 1923 that schools remained tied to history texts. Students memorized lists of battles, dates of the coronations of kings, and details of legislative processes. Thinking that a reasonable alternative was some sort of unified social studies, Rugg developed a series of textbooks based on explanations of social problems. To write these textbooks, Rugg drew information from a wide range of social sciences, arranged it in order of increasing complexity, and applied it to analyses of different significant issues. In this way, he wrote eight books that elementary school-age children could understand and six books designed for secondary school students. Rugg's ideas were not new. He took the idea of research topics from the Madison Conference, turned the topics into social problems, and organized the social studies program around them.

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