Question

Social studies should not be divorced from other subjects. Discuss

Answer 1

Answer:

The term “social studies” has been misunderstood and misused both within and outside the teaching profession. The Committee accepts the obligation and responsibility of clarifying its meaning.

Outside the teaching profession the term “social studies” has been used as a label for “contemporary problems,” as a term implying socialistic or reformist purposes, as relating to social service and social welfare, as an antonym to history, and as a label for a method of teaching. These uses of the term are erroneous.

Within the teaching profession the term has had a variety of uses. It has been used to designate a combination of two or more subjects dealing with human relationships and to designate a combination of the social studies exclusive of history. The term has also been applied to arithmetic, physics, and other subjects in order to stress their social aspects or their values to society.

Teachers and scholars began to realize that these five subjects—history, geography, civics, economics, and sociology—were closely related. All of them deal with human relationships: Geography describes man’s relations to the earth; civics or government explains society’s attempts to control individuals through organized states; economics describes and analyzes man’s efforts to make a living; and sociology describes various kinds of group living. History is the story of whatever man has done, with emphasis upon institutional and group activities. Thus in a sense history is the most inclusive and pervasive of the social studies and partakes of the nature of each of the others when it records activities which fall within their scope.

Furthermore, social studies teachers have increasingly realized that the intimate relationship which exists among the subjects within the social studies field extends, though in a lesser degree, to subjects in other fields.