Social Studies Education

Historical Background

In schools in the United States, social studies has been traditionally associated with the disciplines of history and geography. In recent years, however, the field has increasingly drawn upon the insights of other academic fields, including anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology.

Social studies education, in terms of its founding as a curricular field, is rooted first and foremost in the study of history as a modern subject in colleges and universities—one that emerged during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The first efforts to develop a high school curriculum for the social studies came about through the efforts of the National Education Association's Committee of Ten, which issued a detailed report in 1894 calling for the modernization of the high school curriculum. In 1899, the committee issued a subreport on social studies, which highlighted the need to improve historical study at the elementary and secondary levels. Civil government—what was to become civics—was included in the American history curriculum, which was taught in Grades 7 and 11, along with coursework in Greek, Roman, French, and English history, spread throughout the other grades.

Most curriculum historians agree that the modern field of social studies originated with the 1916 publication of The Social Studies and Secondary Education by the National Education Association Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Schools. Earlier [Page 733]reform movements during the 1890s had introduced history as a core subject in the curriculum. In 1916, the idea of citizenship education was introduced as well. It is the themes of history as a discipline and citizenship education that came to dominate social studies education during the period following World War I. Reforms continued into the 1920s and 1930s. Harold Rugg, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, drew on progressive educational theory—specifically the work of John Dewey—in calling for social studies to focus around problems dealing with contemporary life. Criticisms of Rugg's work focused around the belief that the interdisciplinary and integrative approach he emphasized created a “social stew” with little focus or purpose.

Further attempts to better define the social studies curriculum came in 1929 with the American Historical Association's Commission on the Social Studies. The commission's report, which was drafted by Charles Beard and George S. Counts and issued in 1934, was a radical work, very much reflecting a social reconstructionist approach—one that considered the American capitalist system to be a failure and insisted that social change was imperative. Reactions to the report from the media were extremely negative, rejecting suggestions made in it that the social reconstruction of American society needed to take place through educational reconstruction.

...