A nice job on defining this problem so well — it's maddening to see the same asinine, failed ideas of math and reading march triumphant through the halls of social studies!
The hope that I hold out is to create a new approach to social studies that might get a contingent of educationally progressivist people on board. Such an approach has to start with what a lot of us might agree is something in their favor: the old-style memorize-and-test method really was dreary, at least in the median classroom. (See Professor Binn's "History of Magic" classes at Hogwarts.)
I'm helping work on an approach that tries to bring together some of the best from both worlds. We dub it "Big Spiral History", and anyone who's interested can see it, for example, here: https://www.losttools.org/p/the-world-in-100-stories
History education in my school district in Maryland is awful. Even at the AP level there is far too much emphasis on the sorts of inquiries you discuss and a total lack of coverage of specific events or people (I don’t know that Winston Churchill was ever mentioned in our class nor any battle in any war except as background for some photo or such). Part of the problem is that the teachers don’t know the background themselves since they don’t need to teach it. One tried to explain to my class that Brazil was colonized starting in Colombia and moving southeast because he misread a map.
History classes seem to increasingly becoming English classes with texts that happen to be history related.
I agree that content-rich curriculum is essential to learning. This stems from my work with early reading and literacy programs under NCLB, that showed how kids can excel when exposed to meaningful content, especially kids in poverty. That you’ve connected it to IBL and social studies is very helpful to me.
Excellent piece. Thank you for bringing these dire matters to the attention of those unwittingly supplying innocent victims to the bonfire of educational vanities.
A nice job on defining this problem so well — it's maddening to see the same asinine, failed ideas of math and reading march triumphant through the halls of social studies!
The hope that I hold out is to create a new approach to social studies that might get a contingent of educationally progressivist people on board. Such an approach has to start with what a lot of us might agree is something in their favor: the old-style memorize-and-test method really was dreary, at least in the median classroom. (See Professor Binn's "History of Magic" classes at Hogwarts.)
I'm helping work on an approach that tries to bring together some of the best from both worlds. We dub it "Big Spiral History", and anyone who's interested can see it, for example, here: https://www.losttools.org/p/the-world-in-100-stories
History education in my school district in Maryland is awful. Even at the AP level there is far too much emphasis on the sorts of inquiries you discuss and a total lack of coverage of specific events or people (I don’t know that Winston Churchill was ever mentioned in our class nor any battle in any war except as background for some photo or such). Part of the problem is that the teachers don’t know the background themselves since they don’t need to teach it. One tried to explain to my class that Brazil was colonized starting in Colombia and moving southeast because he misread a map.
History classes seem to increasingly becoming English classes with texts that happen to be history related.
I agree that content-rich curriculum is essential to learning. This stems from my work with early reading and literacy programs under NCLB, that showed how kids can excel when exposed to meaningful content, especially kids in poverty. That you’ve connected it to IBL and social studies is very helpful to me.
Excellent piece. Thank you for bringing these dire matters to the attention of those unwittingly supplying innocent victims to the bonfire of educational vanities.