DEFINITION OF SOCIAL STUDIES

DEFINITION OF SOCIAL STUDIES

In the United States education system, social studies is the integrated study of multiple fields of social science and the humanities, including history, geography, and political science. The term was first coined by American educators around the turn of the twentieth century as a catch-all for these subjects, as well as others which did not fit into the traditional models of lower education in the United States, such as philosophy and psychology.^[1]

In 1912, the Bureau of Education (not to be confused with its successor agency, the United States Department of Education) was tasked by then Secretary of the Interior Franklin Knight Lane with completely restructuring the American education system for the twentieth century. In response, the Bureau of Education, together with the National Education Association, created the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. The Commission was made up of 16 committees (a 17th was established two years later, in 1916), each one tasked with the reform of a specific aspect of the American Education system. Notable among these was the Committee on Social Studies, which was created to consolidate and standardize various subjects which did not fit within normal school curricula into a new subject, to be called “the social studies.”^[2]