The Survey Course in Social Science: An Appraisal

Abstract

T nHAT THE survey course in social science is making its way in colleges and universities has been demonstrated in the preceding paper. There is, however, still a recalcitrant opposition which, partly on educational grounds and partly because the shift to the survey course involves so much inconvenient readjustment and upsets so many vested interests, is still insistent on maintaining the departmentalized curriculum intact. Even among the supporters of the survey course idea there is still much confusion about the differing aims of the various types of survey now being experimented with, and the issues as between the survey and the courses which it replaces are not clear cut. It is hoped in this paper to clarify some of these issues and define the role of the social science survey course in the curriculum a little more exactly. This may help to get consideration of it, by sociologists at least, on its real merits. For the survey is a valuable educational instrument and not just a device created by soft-headed educationists and administrators to keep overworked professors still busier, and to convince the public that X University is more progressive than most. We must begin by agreeing on a definition of what a social science survey course is, because in its present unstandardized state of development many different types of courses pass under that name. For the purposes of our discussion it will be defined as a course offered to college freshmen or sophomores in which the subject matter is drawn from all three of the academic fields of political science, economics, and sociology, and may also be taken from history, anthropology, human geography, social psychology, or any other social science. It is further assumed in the definition that (I) the students enrolled will not have had any previous work at college level in any social science covered in the survey course content and (2) that some effort has been made to interweave or, to use the fashionable term, to integrate, the materials from separate disciplines in relation to some general conceptual scheme. The previous paper has suggested some of the integrating ideas and principles that have been employed in survey courses to date.