Social Studies Standards for What?

Too many state standards have no real purpose and are ethically empty. Why not develop standards that encourage deep and purposeful inquirey?

By Bill Bigelow

I've been away from teaching for two years, working as Rethinking Schools' classroom editor and finishing Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World. As I begin to think about my return to the classroom next fall, I've been revisiting Oregon's social studies standards. I'm sure that they are not that different from standards across the country. Many of them express mom-and-apple pie sentiments that few people could disagree with. For example, students should "understand how individuals, issues, and events changed or significantly influenced the course of U.S. history after 1900." Sure, it's worded awkwardly, but we get the idea: important things happened in the 20th century.

What strikes me while reading these standards is that there is no point to them, no purpose to learning about society. Most troubling, they are ethically empty. In a world of vast and growing economic inequalities, potentially catastrophic environmental crises, seemingly irresolvable ethnic conflicts, public health disasters (such as the AIDS epidemic in southern Africa), and growing hopelessness about possibilities for global justice, the Oregon standards feel irrelevant, distant from any attempt to resolve the burning issues of our time - hollow. And the Department of Education reportedly is marching forward with its plans to construct multiple-choice tests based on these standards.

If we must have fixed standards - and that's a big if - let's have some that actually address in broad terms the most vexing social problems of our time. Isn't that what standards, social studies standards, ought to do? Let's have a discussion about the most fundamental aspects of what our discipline ought to be confronting - not in the abstract, but now, in this era.

ALTERNATIVE SUGGESTIONS

Here are my suggestions for six standards that should be central to all social studies courses. These are tentative and incomplete, but they begin to suggest the deep and purposeful inquiry that ought to be at the heart of every social studies course. Students will:

1. Consistently seek out explanations for social phenomena and learn to distinguish between explanation and mere description.
   
   
2. Recognize how their individual actions affect human and biotic communities throughout the world, reflecting on how every action they take has global social and ecological implications.
   
   
3. Question the ecological sustainability of key economic and cultural practices, and consider alternatives to practices that are deemed unsustainable.
   
   
4. Evaluate the role that racism has played - and continues to play - in shaping the experiences of social groups, especially with respect to economic and political power.
   
   
5. Appreciate the impact social movements have had in addressing injustice of all kinds, and evaluate the effectiveness of those efforts.
   
   
6. See themselves as capable, both individually and collectively, of contributing to social and ecological betterment.

The goal would be to engage in a process in which we ask: What are the basic tools of inquiry that are needed to comprehend the world's most important problems, and to imagine alternatives?

For the past several years, state education departments have engaged in a frenzy of standards writing, taking their cue from business groups with narrow interests and definitions of education. They've squandered countless millions of dollars. The aim of this process has been not so much to understand and change the world as it has been to construct tests that will hold teachers and students "accountable" - i.e., make them fearful of what will happen if they don't do what the state tells them to do.

Do I expect state departments of education to recognize the emptiness of their standardizing-and-testing course and to abandon this strategy of supposed school improvement? No. What I hope is that social studies teachers will resist a project that betrays the mission of social education. I hope that teachers will insist that our discipline is not about educating competent Trivial Pursuit players, nor about simply obeying orders from distant bureaucracies.

The point of social education is to contribute to the creation of a more just world. And we need to say so.

Bill Bigelow (bbpdx@aol.com), Rethinking Schools classroom editor, will be teaching social studies next year at Franklin High School in Portland, OR.

Summer 2002