High School Social Studies

by Justin

There has been some talk on the board lately about how high school curriculums could be improved. This is about as true as true can be. So I decided to brainstorm what would be worthwhile to be learning in a high school social studies program, over the course of a few years.

I remember learning about world history, US history from 1492 onward, a heavy emphasis on the Civil War, and a lot of stuff about government in social studies in high school. While I find all of that stuff extremely valuable, especially the teapot dome scandal and the identity of every explorer, I think there are many things that get left out that would be worthwhile to learn.

  1. Practical Economics – Loans, house buying, equity, debt management, 401k, retirement planning, taxes, and so forth. Every human needs to know about these things. Few learn about them in school.
  2. Early Childhood Psychology – There are some basic things about babies that we know that would be valuable I would think. Why do some parents have better control over their kids than others? We know some reasons, right? Okay, lets maybe teach those to kids before they have babies.
  3. Comparative Religion – Here are what all the religions are about. Does your religion not have more than 1,000,000 members? Sorry, you don’t get to be in the curriculum. I learned about this in 9th grade social studies, but it was too brief.
  4. The Law and Your Rights – I remember getting a booklet on this once. I learned what Miranda rights are. That’s about it. But lets figure out what the most common ways for citizens to interact with the law are, and lets talk about those in school. What do you do if you’re wrongly accused of something? What do you do if you find a dead body? What do you do if you accidentally strangle a hooker? People need to know.
  5. 20th Century History – Seriously. What a joke that we don’t know this. In September of sophomore year of high school, Theo Roosevelt should be president, and we go forward from there. We should be able to knock out a good 20th century history in a year. What’s more important – the names of which explorers discovered what, the name of the country that financed Columbus’s journey to America, or the number of people who died in the Vietnam war? I learned and forgot the first one, I remember the second one, and I couldn’t even guess at the third one. I bet that’s the way a lot of people are. But is Vietnam or the cold war more important to the modern state of the world than military strategy in the Civil War, for example? You bet.
  6. Current News Literature – Where can you learn about the world around me? How is the New York Times different from the Wall Street Journal?
  7. Philosophy – A BRIEF sketch of the history of ideas. We owe quite a debt to some dudes who figured some stuff out. This could be boring, so it needs to be made brief.
  8. Comparitive anthropology – What do other cultures do and why?

Lets maybe see if we can (a) figure out what is most useful for humans to succeed in life and (b) teach those things to kids.