Seventh-Grade Social Studies versus Social Meliorism

ABSTRACT

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), in the state of North Carolina, has gone through considerable recent effort to revise, support, and assess their seventh-grade social studies curriculum in an effort to serve three goals: comply with the Common Core State Standards (Common Core), comply with the North Carolina Essential Standards (Essential Standards), and create a curriculum that best serves students. Meanwhile, the curriculum theory of social meliorism was conceived of over a century ago. Since its inception it has influenced curriculum development and provided a foundation for many other curriculum theories that all start from an assumption that social meliorism holds to an accepted truth that the purpose of education is to improve society and address its injustices. Given contemporary discussions about how to achieve social justice, this is a philosophy that seems particularly meaningful when thinking about the ways that schools can help to accomplish the goals of social justice. I intend to investigate the seventh-grade social studies curriculum of WCPSS in 2014 and juxtapose it with the goals and ideals of social meliorism, determine how well the curriculum addresses the goals of that curriculum theory, and make suggestions for how a social meliorist might suggest modifying the curriculum to better serve the needs of society.

KEYWORDS:

• Social meliorism
• social justice
• curriculum
• middle school

Notes

1. North Carolina Essential Standards: Seventh-Grade Social Studies, 2012, http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/acre/standards/new-standards/social-studies/7.pdf

2. Ibid

3. Common Core State Standards Initiative. 2012. Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

4. Common Core. n.d., http://www.ncpublicschools.org/acre/standards/common-core/

5. Grade 7 Social Studies, 2014, http://cmapp.wcpss.net/curriculum/courseguide

6. Barnes, Harry Elmer, “The Place of Albion Woodbury Small in Modern Sociology,” The American Journal of Sociology 32 (1926): 44

7. Small, Albion W., “Scholarship and Social Agitation,” The American Journal of Sociology 1 (1896): 564

8. Ibid., 569

9. Ibid., 571

10. Ibid., 574

11. Stanley, William B., “Social Studies and the Social Order: Transmission or Transformation?” Social Education 69 (2005): 284

12. Ibid., 283

13. Counts, George S., “Dare the School Build a New Social Order,” The Curriculum Studies Readers, eds. David J. Flinders and Stephen J. Thornton, 2004, 45

14. Stanley, “Social Studies and the Social Order,” 283

15. Counts, “Dare the School,” 51

16. Kliebard, Herbert M., The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2004), 152

17. Winters, Elmer A., and Harold Rugg, “Man and His Changing Society: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg,” History of Education Quarterly (1967): 497

18. Ibid., 503

19. Kliebard, The Struggle, 171

20. Ibid., 168

21. Grade Seven Social Studies

22. Ibid

23. North Carolina Essential Standards: Seventh-Grade Social Studies

24. Grade Seven Social Studies

25. Common Core

26. Grade Seven Social Studies

27. Ibid

28. Ibid

29. Ibid

30. Counts, “Dare the School,” 45

31. Kliebard, The Struggle

32. Stanley, “Social Studies,” 286

33. Ibid