Social Studies, New

Background

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, in 1957, the general public perception was that the Russians had pulled ahead of the United States in terms of scientific advance. American military and political leaders began to examine areas in K–12 education that [Page 842]were said to account for the supposed deficiency. The National Science Foundation, created in 1950 in order to improve science education and research, and the 1958 passage of the National Defense Education Act provided the impetus and the funding to reform curriculum and instruction in K–12 science and mathematics, and in foreign languages.

The federally funded movement led to the development of curriculum materials that were labeled “the new math” or “the new science.” In September 1959 the Education Committee of the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a conference at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod in order to examine the fundamental processes involved in imparting the substance and method of science to young learners. The report summarizing the proceedings of the conference was written by Jerome Bruner and published in 1960 as The Process of Education. It set out the themes for the entire curriculum reform movement in all academic subject areas, including that which would be called the New Social Studies.

The Process of Education has four basic themes that would establish the agenda for the New Social Studies. The first was that the structures that make up academic disciplines should form the basis for curriculum; the second was readiness, or, as Bruner wrote, the notion that “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development,” which reflected Piaget's influence on Bruner. The third theme was intuition, particularly as a learned skill, and finally, motivation, including those factors that support or that threaten a child's motivation to learn.

There had been little call for reform of social studies in the decade of the 1950s, and as a result, the field was slow in responding to the general trend following Woods Hole. In 1961, Charles R. Keller, a historian and former director of the Advanced Placement program, wrote an article for the Saturday Review chastising the social studies for lagging behind other content areas. He challenged social studies educators to undertake the type of curriculum reform characteristic of the new math and the new science. Keller urged a revamping of the entire social studies construct, acknowledging the artificial nature of the subject and replacing the term social studies with “history and the social sciences.”

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