Intro to the leaked recommendations for the Alberta Social Studies Kindergarten to Grade 4 Curriculum
Note: This document caused some controversy when the CBC (misleadingly) reported on it yesterday. I have formatted this text here so that it can be read more easily. I did not write this, but as an elementary school teacher, I heartily endorse it. But here it is, so you can read through it and decide for yourself!
An educated adult citizen living in 1989, hearing the news that the Berlin Wall is being dismantled, should not be asking herself: “What wall? There’s a wall in Berlin?” Rather, an informed citizen should have sufficient general knowledge to respond in a way that resembles this: “Ah, that ugly wall is finally coming down. I know what this means: that the totalitarian regime of East Germany is cracking up after all these years — the wall that the Communist government built in the early 1960s to keep people from fleeing to the West. I’m pretty sure some people died trying to get across No Man’s Land from the East Zone. People have long dreamed of this moment. It might even mean the end of the Cold War.”
Yes, it is true that a superficial grasp of the “Berlin Wall” could be obtained from a quick internet search. But in order to truly understand what the internet tells us — especially about major local, national, and international issues and events — we need context and background that cannot be gleaned in a few minutes or hours. In order for new information to make sense, in order to understand what we are witnessing today, we need to have building blocks, facts and understanding stored in our long-term memory.
How does it get there? To continue with the same example, to understand the collapse of the Berlin Wall, we need to know that after World War II, Germany was divided into two countries at the insistence of the Soviet Union; that after many years of East German citizens seeking a better life in West Germany, the Communist government in 1961 built a wall of concrete, asbestos, and barbed wire cutting through the heart of Berlin; that Berlin is the historic capital of Germany (but was not always); and that the Western Allies, including military forces of the United States and Canada that were based in West Germany, stood on the brink of war over the wall’s construction. The wall became a symbol of the brutal divide between East and West.
That much would be a good basic knowledge. But there remain deeper questions still. If Germany is still a leading country in Europe, politically and economically, who are the Germans, apart from people who speak German? Was their country always united? Were there people in the West who sincerely believed that the East German regime, if flawed, was at least an alternative non-capitalist vision of the good society? How would I evaluate that belief? What elements of the Cold War and the East Bloc are related somehow to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) during World War II? In turn are these events in any way connected to the First World War, Bismarck the “Iron Chancellor,” Prussia, Napoleon, the German Confederation, the Holy Roman Empire, conflict with the Papacy, Frederick the Great (whose nickname was “Barbarossa” or “Red Beard”) and his conquests? What about earlier history going back even to the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire across the Rhine and Danube Rivers?
There is no quick fix to establish what should really be ordinary general knowledge, a sequence of basic events and issues, without having committed some facts to memory and knowing how they fit together. And such understanding and context can only be built up over many years. The earlier students can start to put building blocks in place, the better and more sophisticated, layered, and textured will be their perspective as citizens of a complex world when they graduate from high school.
The same reflection can be applied to contemporary local issues such as the state of oil and gas industry in Alberta today, or Alberta’s relationship with other provinces and with the Federal Government; to the status of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, and other minorities; or any other local or national issue.
As Amy von Heyking has written in her submission, strong Social Studies knowledge and understanding are a requirement for “deep understandings about significant questions,” and in order to “come to well-reasoned judgments about issues they will face as citizens.”
Moreover, Social Studies in the past has not been particularly demanding or content-rich. Students have not been asked to know or understand very much information. To quote von Heyking, “Historically, Social Studies programs have been general, even vague, in purpose and diffuse in content, so that students (and teachers) were not clear about why the content should matter to them.”
Apart from current events, there is the overarching need to have well-informed graduates with a cultivated sense of what is true, good, and beautiful; citizens who are an example to the country and to the world around us. To achieve that goal, Social Studies needs to draw from specific subject matter in economics, geography, history, political science (“civics”), and cultural knowledge including basic philosophical and religious literacy, that should be part of general knowledge.
Students and teachers need explicit knowledge outcomes in order to open the door for students to understand the world we live in, to be capable of integrating new information and new skills into a foundation of knowledge and understanding built up over many years of learning, eager to acquire more and to take pride in knowing and appreciating many things. We cannot understand other people’s cultures unless we have a deep understanding of our own.
History and geography in particular rely on a framework of integrated facts and understanding. The earlier that students’ memory can be trained and exercised by remembering basic building blocks, the sooner they will be able to take pride in learning and retaining a significant body of information that grows into a coherent and broad-minded knowledge base.
History is a window into the complexity of people, ideas, and events where there are often no easy answers but a need to be cognizant of diversity, change, and the fragility of order and civility in a society. History shows that nothing should be taken for granted when it comes to rights and freedoms, prosperity and peace in a world where dictatorship, poverty, and war are often the norm rather than the exception. As citizens in our own rapidly changing technological society, we need to know the origins of the ideas and actions that have formed our civilization. Part of that is an extensive knowledge of local and world geography, economics, politics (civics), and a strong knowledge and appreciation of the rise and fall of Ancient, Medieval, and pre-modern civilizations and worldviews that went before us. After all, shouldn’t people have some knowledge of how civilizations rise and fall, if only to ensure that we ourselves do not repeat the tragic mistakes of the past?
Elementary age children have a phenomenal capacity for memory tailored for rapid language acquisition. Many oral and written traditions have practices of memorizing long poems or stories by heart, and to retell and perform them with great pleasure and panache, for example, the recitations of the Quran without knowing Arabic, or Panini Grammar prior to knowing Sanskrit. An enduring window into Ancient Roman virtues is Macaulay’s poem “Horatius at the Bridge.”
Students can and should start early in training their “memory muscles” just as they do in mathematics. Just as basic math facts are the necessary foundation for understanding math and thinking mathematically for the rest of one’s life, facts and understanding serve as a foundation for a growing body of Social Studies knowledge.
Starting in Grade 2, I have proposed that students memorize four dates in Canadian and Albertan history; in Grade 3 they learn 14 new dates and in Grade 4 a further 18 dates for a total of 36 by the end of Grade 4. That is not so very many, given how absorbent young people’s memories are. Grade 4 is the year in which I propose that they create a cumulative time chart with all dates learned and reviewed so far in Grade 2, 3 and 4.
Having a few historical dates in their long-term memory accomplishes a few things: (1) it exercises the “memory muscles”; (2) when reviewing their knowledge a Grade later and recalling a date they have learned, they already feel a sense of accomplishment: “I know this!”; (3) chronological dates provide rungs on the ladder on which new historical knowledge coheres and makes sense as they go through Grades 5 and up; and (4) knowing places, people, and dates complements their overall sense that accuracy, sequence, and context in history are important things to know in themselves as life-long learners.
This is not a call to return to the days of rote memorization or “drill and kill.” On the contrary, memorization has been out of fashion for many decades. But there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reasonable memory work (active and satisfying, not passive and stultifying), can be combined through fun quiz-based and even competitive-team repetition with a love of learning. That solid base of knowledge sets up graduates to emerge into the world as critical, independent, reflective thinkers and democratic citizens, well equipped for what the world may throw at them because, in a sense, they have seen it all before in Social Studies class.
Students will graduate as true lifelong learners, well on the way to being informed and responsible citizens, provided they have been given the opportunity during their twelve brief years in school to develop, as early as possible, a lasting sense of wonder, curiosity and a love of inquiry. With this, a sense of joy and accomplishment in learning and discussing many things will empower them to take on the world and make it a better place.