“Social studies” — as opposed to history, geography and civics —
was invented in the Progressive era to socialize children for a
future planned by technocrats, writes Michael Knox Beran in City
Journal. It’s become dull, vacuous and a waste of time. Abolish
social studies! Social studies is hostile to individualism,
Beran writes. A 1931 social studies book for junior high school
students condemned the U.S. economy’s wasteful lack of central
planning and extolled Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which
“resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor.”
In the 1940s, as social studies took root in elementary schools,
there were no more paeans to central planning. Paul Hanna’s
texts were designed to teach children “desirable patterns of
acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the
second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which
describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other
public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and
“cooperation in ob