Wednesday, March 10, 2004

What’s missing is vital to understanding our nation

As a social studies teacher, I have the important task of enabling my students to become informed, productive, and contributing members of our democratic society. I am not alone.

Throughout this county and state, there are many dedicated teachers employing powerful strategies to motivate and stimulate their students’ interest in and understanding of social studies. In the next couple of months, the state Department of Education will vote on a new social studies curriculum. I believe that this new curriculum will fail to enrich our students’ understanding of the world and this nation.

My main objection to the new curriculum is that it contradicts major principles in human development. Jean Paint and other developmental psychologists stressed that younger children work best on the concrete level. As a result, they are limited in their ability to fully comprehend such historical processes as change over time, different perspectives, and multiple causes of significant events.

It is only common sense that a sophomore or junior in high school has developed greater analytical and abstract thinking skills than he or she possessed in elementary or middle school.

As a consequence of only offering major historical period in the lower grades, my fear is that our children will have a confused, decontextualized, historical understanding of our past.

The proposed curriculum also violates important scientific knowledge concerning learning and memory. Teachers at elementary and middle schools are responsible for introducing important events, concepts, and historical figures to their students. They create schemas, or frameworks, for their students that organize this new information.

As students progress through school, these schemes are stretched to assimilate and accommodate new information. As a result, the students are enabled to engage in critical thinking. The new curriculum fails to address this basic fact of learning by not reinforcing novel information covered in elementary and middle schools.

They are several alternatives that would establish higher standards and greater expectations for our students than the proposed reforms of the new curriculum. For example, a wonderful sequence for our state to adopt would be the advanced placement United States History outline.

Most advanced placement teachers would agree that they finish the course in mid-April, allowing two weeks for review for the test in May. If we were to follow this outline, the regular classroom teacher would be given an extra six weeks to cover the objectives of the course. As a result, we would establish challenging goals for student learning and performance.

Another option that should be considered is requiring a fourth year of social studies on the secondary level. I have a difficult time understanding the rationale behind freshmen in Fayette County taking three electives each semester and not one social studies class.

Instead of starting world history at 1600 AD, as proposed in the new curriculum, our state should consider combining geography (an elective) with world history for a two-year course. Once again, we would be creating a more challenging, demanding curriculum without sacrificing “breadth over substance.”

The opponents of this plan will argue that the cost to implement this change would be too prohibitive. My response is that our children are worth the price and ignorance of our past is much more costly.

I will be the first to admit that I am not objective in this debate. I feel passionately that every high school student should not be denied a deep understanding of such topics as the formation of our nation, Jacksonian democracy, and Manifest Destiny.

It saddens me that in high school classrooms, the Civil War with its entire concomitant political, social, and economic ramifications will not be discussed. Nor will secondary students compare the development and contribution of early civilizations, major world religions, or the foundations of modern nations. I cannot comprehend how omitting such important topics can be seen as a dramatic improvement in public education.

The state Department of Education has given the citizens of Georgia the opportunity to discuss and make their opinions known in regards to this new curriculum. I encourage the citizens of Fayette County to join this crucial debate. Our children deserve and should be offered the best possible education.

Jan Daniel

Fayette County High School

Fayetteville, Ga.