Chester Finn vs The Social Studies.

Hot off the Presses!

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has just published two new reports examining what American students are being taught about history and civics, the dangers we face in the war on terror, and how the field of “social studies” has reduced the study of history to an ambiguous subject based on multiculturalism and moral relativism rather than the rigorous study of our past.

Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? and Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know are both available at www.edexcellence.net/socialstudies/socialstudies.html. Also newly available on the Fordham website is “Six Questions to Ask on Back to School Night,” suggestions for parents wanting to appraise their child’s social studies curriculum.

From Checker's Desk (editorial by Chester E. Finn, Jr.)
The social studies mess

With schools re-opening, daily attacks in the middle east, and the second anniversary of 9/11 hard upon us, teachers can expect another round of nonsense from experts who think it’s more important to boost children’s self-esteem and tolerance than to instruct them in the history of their own and other countries, the wellsprings of citizenship, and the price of defending freedom.

Worse, the bad advice from such quarters as the National Council for the Social Studies, National Education Association, and National Association of School Psychologists, telling educators what to teach about September 11 (and terrorism and Iraq), is only the tip of the crumbling mountain known as “social studies.” It begins in the early grades with a dreary curriculum called “expanding environments” that acquaints children with “community helpers” (e.g., “your friendly postal service worker”) but neglects to introduce them to the great tales of patriotism and treachery that make history so gripping. It continues in middle school with a multicultural piñata from which the world’s foods, holidays, and quaint customs shower down on youngsters who possess no foundation in basic chronology or geography. It finishes in high school with a quick dash through U.S. history and perhaps a civics course that nowadays may be replaced by semi-politicized volunteer work called “service learning.”

No wonder our kids cannot find Baghdad or Jerusalem on a map, have little or know understanding of how today’s world came to be the way it is, and are clueless about why—and even when—the Civil War was fought. Social studies is a deeply boring, intellectually muddled, and politically correct mess, taught by people who themselves have not studied much history and ruled by statewide academic standards that often consist of present-minded “themes” and pop-psych “strands” but little serious academic content.

For a long time, this field’s decline resembled that of the Roman Empire: protracted, inexorable and sad, but not something one could do much about, even as evidence mounted that youngsters were emerging from high school with scant knowledge of history, geography, civics or economics. Evidence also mounted that the movers and shapers within social studies had little respect for Western civilization; a disposition to view America as a problem for mankind rather than its best hope; a tendency to pooh-pooh history’s factual highlights as “privileging” elites; a tendency to view geography in terms of despoiling the rain forest rather than locating Baghdad on a map; a notion of “civics” that stresses political activism rather than understanding how laws are made and why they matter; and anxiety that studying economics might unfairly advantage the free-market version.

So intractable and hopeless was the social studies problem that serious education reformers tended to forget about it and hope this empire would quietly decline until it fell. Other issues—phonics, testing, vouchers, etc.—absorbed people’s attention.

Then came the 9/11 attacks (and their counterparts from Yemen to Nairobi to Riyadh) and an immediate dilemma: what to teach children about these horrific events. The establishment answer was teach them to feel good about themselves, forgive their trespassers, not blame the perpetrators (lest this foster hatred or prejudice), laud diversity, and consider the likelihood that America was itself responsible for the evil visited upon it.

Teachers were not urged to explain why bad people and tyrannical regimes abhor freedom; why America is repugnant to those who would enslave minds, subjugate women, and kill people different from themselves; why the United States is worth defending; and how our forebears responded to previous attacks. Avoid teaching such things. They are jingoistic, pre-modern, dogmatic, wrong. So signaled the mandarins of social studies.

And thus they also showed that their field was no harmless, crumbling wreck but a mischievous force within our schools. In 2003, we urgently need our children to learn what it means to be American, to understand the world they inhabit and the conflicts that rock it, and to grasp the differences between democracy and totalitarianism and between free and doctrinaire societies. Yet the subject we rely on to teach youngsters such things has actually become a hindrance to their learning.

What to do? Exposure may help. Sunlight usually does. One source is test results and their continuing evidence of what U.S. students do and don’t know. Yet many states don’t even include social studies in their testing programs, few test history per se, and practically nowhere do the results count. Although the National Assessment of Educational Progress intermittently probes history and civics, its results are not reported for states or districts and don’t count in the No Child Left Behind act (which focuses on reading and math).

If it’s true that “what gets tested is what gets taught,” then testing students’ knowledge of U.S. history (and geography, civics, etc.) would provide a boost to teaching and learning these subjects. Making such scores count for promotion and graduation—and school and state “accountability”—would help more. It would also oblige governors, superintendents, and journalists to focus on social studies rather than entrusting this field to its mandarins.

Yes, testing would help. More than that, however, we need to bring the basics back into social studies. Start with a few simple curricular tenets: That democracy is the worthiest form of human government and that we cannot take its survival for granted. Rather, it depends on our transmitting to each new generation the political vision of liberty and equality that unites us as Americans—and a deep loyalty to the political institutions our founders established to fulfill that vision.

Jefferson prescribed education for all citizens “to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” This is truer today then ever.

Welcome back to school, boys and girls.

[and]

Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies

Social studies and the battle for America's soul

The two new Fordham social studies reports (available at www.edexcellence.net/socialstudies/socialstudies.html) will be the topic of a roundtable discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on September 16, “Social Studies and the Battle for America’s Soul.” The panel will feature former Secretary of Education William Bennett, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? co-editors James Leming and Lucien Ellington, and Rick Theisen, former president of the National Council for the Social Studies. For details, or to register, go to http://www.aei.org/events/type.upcoming,eventID.603,filter.all/event_detail.asp.