Nineteenth Century Origins of the Social Studies Movement: Understanding the Continuity between Older and Contemporary Civic and U.S. History Textbooks

Abstract

Abstract The current debate on social studies textbooks — as reflected in the writings of FitzGerald, Weisberger arid Roselle — center around the alleged dullness, vacuity and intellectual sterility of social studies texts. The debate is hardly new. However, when one compares U.S. history and civics texts of the last century with those written in the last twenty years, and attempts to relate both to the writings of social studies educators, the debate vanishes into irrelevance. It would appear that the social studies founding fathers modeled many of their major ideas after the assumptions of 19th century positivist social science. One can trace this relationship in the famous 1916 Social Studies Committee report. Writers of this report (1) related social studies to a conception of citizenship, (2) perceived the data of social science as shedding light on natural laws, (3) assumed that social scientist would select the “social problems” that students ought to study, (4) believed that use of social science ...