By 2025, skill instruction will have taken precedence within the typical American educational environment. Within the social studies, extensive content knowledge, once associated with upward social and economic mobility, now seems increasingly distant from the skills needed by students to succeed professionally within the digital age. Unless our educators adopt significant conceptual and practical changes, students and parents will continue to identify a dichotomy between “useful” courses, such as math and science, and relatively “useless” courses, such as history. Content knowledge can continue to serve a vital purpose in the educational system only if three conditions are met within the next two decades. As painful as it may be to our pre-digital age sensibilities, we must abandon formerly hallowed gauges of intellect and sophistication.
Firstly, content knowledge must come to be seen as a framework in which skill instruction takes place. It cannot continue to be gauged by assessments that require little, if any, practical skills. Currently, the primacy of content knowledge remains entrenched to the detriment of analytical skills, professional skills, and skills of expression. Social studies teachers should remember that every major technological development occurs along a timeline, and that by helping students to identify their own particular interests along a timeline, they can better understand their passions and their roles in society. Currently, teachers’ fondness for their content too often becomes more important than their students’ need for it. Instead of expressing their knowledge to help individual students with individual needs, they express it with the hope of bring all students to an ethereal, golden standard.
Secondly, schools must eliminate their survey courses. As students and parents demand that schools create curriculums better designed for personal and professional development, history survey courses will seem increasingly irrelevant. It is extremely detrimental for students to spend their time within World History I, World History II, and U.S. History. We should not permit these courses to remain in their present form. Why, will students ask, should their time be spent learning the minutia of the French Revolution? Worse still, why should their time be spent memorizing a disconnected litany of facts framed within a survey course? All social studies courses should instead be framed thematically like the courses designed within the International Baccalaureate program. Analysis, not absorption, could then take precedence, as students are encouraged to thoroughly explore the developments of a particular event or era.
Thirdly, we must recognize that we are not only failing to help students develop the skills they need within the digital age. We are also failing to help them develop skills that have been needed since the advent of the post-industrial age. In short, we are several decades behind where we need to be. Instead of simply adjusting our social studies courses, we must completely transform them. The ease of this change will depend upon a willingness to depart from the prevailing standardization model that requires students to gain a cursory knowledge of as many topics as possible. Instead of helping students to become “well-rounded,” teachers must help them learn to express thoughts and opinions excellently through the written and spoken word. Because they will be judged by their capacity to contribute to change, students must learn to make impact, not simply recognize the impact of others.
Unless the American educational system adapts to present needs and interests of the populations that it serves, it will continue to decline. We should not preserve bastions of esoteric knowledge any longer. We should rather thematically frame our content courses in order to help students develop the analytical skills that they can then apply to any field or profession.
