Legislating Curriculum Or Why Kids Hate Social Studies
State legislatures sacrifice academic freedom and further marginalize minority students. by Bill Gee
(centrist)
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
This month, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill requiring that all schools include “gay history” into their curriculums. As a former Social Studies teacher, my knee-jerk reaction was “oh no! Not again!”, and made me very glad that I no longer work in that environment.
Don’t get me wrong. As a teacher and citizen of the human race, I am a firm believer in the dignity of all human beings, and I will be the first to acknowledge that minority groups in this country have been and continue to be subjected to enormous indignities and abuse. I also firmly believe that it is the job of every Social Studies teacher in this country to communicate the message of human dignity and to incorporate that theme into their curriculum.
What I take issue with is the top-down approach of the state legislature and the Governor in any state to dictate what goes on in my classroom. I would further argue that the California law violates the dignity and professionalism of every Social Studies teacher in America.
The Classroom as Safe-Haven
Every Social Studies classroom is a unique place. For 180 or 90 days, what you have is a small society that meets anywhere between one to two hours every day or every other day where they are supposed to be exploring their own humanity and their roles in society. This is accomplished through a curriculum of history, civics, geography, economics, and psychology. If done right, each day students should leave the classroom with more questions than they came in with. What makes the classroom unique is that every student walks in the door with an already-established world view that has been shaped by their parents, their friends and the media. It is the job of the Social Studies teacher to tear down those preconceived ideas in order to expand their mental horizons beyond anything they originally believed to be possible.
In order to accomplish the main objective of the Social Studies curriculum, the students must have a degree of trust with their teacher. They must believe that their teacher already respects each and every one of them so that they can feel safe enough to open their minds to concepts and ideas that may contradict things they may think they already know. In order to establish that trust, the teacher needs to have the freedom to find the right combination of academic material to teach.
Legislation Undermines Trust
A terrible thing happens when a state legislature, state education department, or the Federal Department of Education decrees what exactly will be taught and not taught in the classroom. What happens is that the teacher no longer has the ability to establish that trust with the students. When a student perceives that the teacher has no control over what or how he/she teaches, it gives that student license to ignore everything that teacher says. Therefore, trust never gets a chance to be established and the student leaves the classroom learning absolutely nothing. (Except that they hate Social Studies!)
Another problem is one of time. Social Studies teachers are burdened with more “mandates” on their curriculums than any other academic discipline. So much so that most school districts have codified their curriculums so that when teachers design their lesson plans, they must include the legislative codes next to each teaching point so that at least on paper, they can prove to the state that they are meeting each mandated academic point. Further, each lesson plan must be approved by a department supervisor who must measure the amount of time the teacher spends on each mandated item to be sure that the minimum number of hours is applied to that subject. When a new “mandate” is added, rarely is another mandate taken away, which further limits the amount of time a teacher can use for spontaneous teaching, which further erodes the ability to establish trust and authority.
The results of this breakdown in trust is a generation of students who are woefully ignorant of basic Social Studies skills, which makes them more vulnerable to the influence of propaganda and lies told to them by politicians and the popular media.
A Better Social Studies Model
Why not rather than giving Social Studies teachers a list of mandates, we instead provide them with a list of desired outcomes, and train them in the fine art of “reading” their students? They can then incorporate the desired outcome into an already established lesson.
For example, rather than giving a High School Civics teacher a mandate to teach a 90 minute lesson on “Gay History”, the teacher will first gage the student’s level of understanding of the issue and then make the necessary adjustments to their lesson. This can be easily done by first spending five minutes discussing a current or past court case involving an important legal issue involving homosexual issues. In that discussion, the teacher can gage whether he/she feels as though the students already possess the desired social outcome. If they do, then there is no need to “beat them over the head” by subjecting them to a lesson on something they already understand. If they don’t, then the teacher can either incorporate the “Gay History” lesson into their lesson on Civil Rights, or if they feel the students are seriously lacking in the desired outcome, they can give them the “full treatment” of the 90-minute lesson plan.
While I am sure that some politicians are well-meaning individuals and they want to do everything they can to promote the dignity of all human beings, doing so by mandating curriculum in the public schools will have the opposite desired effect. If they truly wanted to give the GLBT community the human dignity they deserve, they should stop all this nonsense about gay marriage and legally provide all American Citizens equal rights under the law.
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