Social Studies is stuck at the beginning of time, while our tweens are blind to Khashoggi, Crimea, surveillance, and the faltering priority of free expression

If you’ve got a 5th or 6th grader, then you have also printed his Mesopotamia ppt at work, built a model Roman aqueduct in a shoebox, or made a poster about pharaohs, papyrus and the Nile River. My 6th grader is the fourth in line, so I’m getting pretty tired of it, although I can whip one up quickly. But since some of our kids at any given time are pursuing individualized study, I can’t help but notice how different social studies can be.  (These days we are in a small, icy, dark city in the north of Kazakhstan, so I’m sympathetic that time with friends is often more important than real learning. My kids are homeschooling in turns with brick-and-mortar school). 

This past fall my 13-year old daughter and I created social studies around a daily news feed, that sometimes captured her personal interests, and sometimes followed trending articles in politics, international security, and justice. Instead of books, she downloaded the Economist app, we

subscribed to that and Wall Street Journal, she followed Politico, Slate, Huffington Post and RealClear. When an issue seemed to be more than a daily headline but a signal of our changing times-- Russian incursions in the Black Sea, Trump dismissive of Khashoggi murder, tensions in South China Sea, under-reporting of National Climate Assessment-- then we dug up more, followed links and tracked it for several days.

A key to all of this was that we read the news-- or at least the first few paragraphs-- together. I pointed her, and she pointed me, to articles. Sometimes they hung together, of-a-piece, and we talked about that over lunch. Often she skipped around, from allegations against Facebook to U.S. university shout-downs and ‘microaggressions’, from California wildfires to trade wars. We didn’t need to talk about everything. We talked about what interested her.

Another help was that I hired a graduate student of international security studies in Nairobi to WhatsApp twice-weekly with my daughter. We kept a list of article links and passed them to her in advance of the chats. Those scheduled calls created a discipline, which meant my daughter had to get through her news, and had to remember enough to talk about it. It was interesting for me to over-hear her trail of thought as their conversation drifted from one headline to another.

No memorization, no tests, no chronology.

Instead, my daughter’s interaction with social studies was contemporaneous, exploratory, and above all, rooted in conversation. When she asked why the South China Sea is referred to as a “tinderbox,” we found an Infographic mini-lecture together. When she wondered why the U.S. administration has to seem friendly to Saudi Arabia, we found a bunch more articles in Atlantic Monthly. My background implementing development projects with adult education suggests that making learning timely, relevant, social and reinforced through active conversation will make my daughter’s interaction with this information more likely to assimilate into her active thinking about the world around her. But that wasn’t my only goal. More importantly, my daughter wants to consume news. And now she also knows how.

I’m saddened by contrast to watch my 6th grader cynically filling the blanks of his 27-page ditto-packet about ancient Mesopotamia. Fertile crescent. Tigris and Euphrates. Cradle of civilization... He watches “90-Day Fiance” in the background while he fills it out. Having seen this version of social studies so many times, I can’t help feeling that the irrelevant, boring design is intentional.

At school, social studies never gets within 50 years of the present, often not even 500 years. It’s chronological. It has big, bolded words with 3-word definitions next to them. It drills conceptual frameworks (What are the 5 traits of civilization?) to lobotomized kids, who copy phrases from page 34 into the "Critical Thinking" space on page 36. It’s non-controversial. It’s quickly forgotten. It’s so remote that even the teachers struggle to find some way to make it look exciting. (For more depressing views, try joining the FB group, Middle School Social Studies Teachers.)

Chronological learning about society ignores the obvious truth that most of us don’t seek or need a huge background to interact with real-time problems. As Elon Musk said, when building an engine, we don’t stop and study the derivation of the monkey-wrench. We just figure out how to use it. And I can see through my daughter’s experience that she becomes curious around issues like Russian shopping mall fires, American mass-shootings, Hungarian bigotry and Chinese facial-recognition surveillance, and her curiosity drives a backward examination of how these things came about. Her thinking is not in timelines. She is discovering the monkey-wrenches in her own messy way.

The “mastery” (if you speak IB) or content-memorization approach to history short-circuits the tween mind, and prevents this messy discovery process.

Mind-numbingly dull social studies lessons fit into a Hobbesian view about kids and, paradoxically, perpetuate the Hobbesian kid. Kids couldn’t care less. They hate it. They want to eat chips and watch BuzzFeed. So we hold them to their chairs, cram it down their throats (and occasionally dress it up with costumes, food-tasting and dioramas made at 11pm by exhausted working mothers). We threaten and hold the grading system over their heads. Kids comply and memorize, hate every moment, forget, and return to chips and BuzzFeed. This closes the Hobbesian loop. As soon as social studies will end, these persecuted teens will settle into making money, watching cable news-tainment, and continuing not to give a shit about the world.

I’ve written before about the wisdom of political dissidents in their fights--against whatever odds--for self-determination. About the different human value of an hour spent according to one’s own will versus complying to the will of a system. I’ve questioned why education is more Hobbesian than Lockean. Are we afraid of what our kids are made of? Is it unsettling to think of teens skipping over papyrus or the Spanish Inquisition?

For sure, the Hobbesian-programmed kid takes time to discover his productive internal motivations when you take away compulsion and timelines. You have programmed him that way. Learning-to-learn is a process. Tweens need nudges to Politico, to Slate, to the Economist. They need mentors and reminders and some urgency to read.

It takes time, patience, and daily interactions with news to cultivate the civic mind. That’s what social studies should be.

What do we mean by Equality when we're talking about teen education?

What is equality? And when some of us get together talking about secondary education, why do I get the feeling we’re talking about different things?

Alexis De Tocqueville sees human equality as an inexorable force driving the ceaseless advance of democracy. He writes about equality in the opening of Democracy in America, “it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.” Equality then, is an undeniable fact. Human exertions continually reveal it, “some unknowingly and some despite themselves,” and thus what Fukuyama calls The March of Equality toward the ultimate political model, continues unstoppable.

The view of human equality as self-evident is central to the Jeffersonian view of democracy. Neither he nor Locke believed in an equality of physical endowments or intellectual capability (Jefferson was an aristocrat and slave-owner), but it was the idea of equality in the eyes of God, the equality of claims on life, liberty and happiness, the equality of a right to dignity, that formed the cornerstone of Western liberal democracy. The kind of equality Jefferson was talking about might not be visually evident, but it is morally self-evident that, under the eyes of our Creator, every human equally deserves opportunity and the tools for self-realization.

Education as a vertical

It should be no surprise, then, that underlying our day-to-day interaction with schools, curricula, education policies, and standardized testing, the desire to assert and protect equality motivates us. The No Child Left Behind Act drew on a vision of education as a vertical along which deviation should be minimized; the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 took this construct further--the vertical itself should be revisioned as a model in which everyone is on top.

Everyone is a winner

If education were an Olympic sport, while some teams are doping their athletes, ours would be preparing a hundred gold medals and a podium wide enough to hold all the contestants.

Of course these visual metaphors reflect an ideal behind legislation; in practice, the tools to effect greater equality involve reshuffling students and teachers, focusing time and resources on a few core competencies, standardized testing, and the re-allocation of (mostly state) funds. The focus is not on

When minimizing deviation
means minimizing choice

equal opportunity through individual choices, but toward equal learning outcomes through greater standardization. A key to social fairness, equality in education, according to this OECD policy brief, is enhanced when states minimize the sorting of students by aptitude and “manage school choice to contain the risks to equity”. (italics added)

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes can be consistent goals when they relate to essential life skills, particularly literacy and numeracy. These are baseline needs for functioning within an economy, for accessing new knowledge, managing one’s finances and communicating effectively. Governments should place high priority on young people mastering these skills and mastering them consistently.

However, secondary education should be something different. Teens’ strengths and emerging interests become much more diverse than can be well served by a system focused on delivering equal outcomes.

We see, then, a contradiction within the Western ideal of equality as it relates to education. Jefferson described humans that are inevitably equal, against all visible odds, equal in their claim to liberty and their right to their own pursuits. An aristocrat and founder of libraries, he emphasized the importance of cultivating literacy and virtuous citizens, but he also advocated for a very limited government, trusting the “moral sense and sympathetic instinct” of humans to guide their own development. On the other hand, the march toward universal success as a recasting of equality takes as its given that humans are born (or come to kindergarten) distinctly unequal, and that it is the role of an active state, through the narrowing of choices, the selection of a core of knowledge, and testing, to cast a K-12 corridor that reduces variation in outcomes.

The narrowing of choice and emphasis on equal outcomes seems even more inappropriate as the range of freely accessible online learning content has grown exponentially. As Clay Christensen pointed out in his 2010 book, Disrupting Class, the potential for completely individualized, personally-motivated learning has been around for years, but the design of school buildings and classrooms, allocation of teachers and supplies, still tends toward a monolithic, homogeneous process into which the child is inserted. Christensen optimistically predicted a sea-change within a year or two. But students are still covering books in September that reflect a state-endorsed curriculum and multi-year textbook procurement cycles; classes are still geared toward standardized tests.

Many families accept the inevitability of an equal-outcomes, managed-choice approach to secondary education, because it has been seen as inextricably connected to America’s other obsession: college admissions. I wrote about this mythical corridor earlier. Once admitted to college, these teens have grown into a passive, tell-me-what-to-think generation hardly equipped to grab life by the horns.

Plato and Nietzsche shared the view that humans deeply desire the dialectic, the ability to reason, judge, assign value, and have value assigned to ourselves. Hegel called it thymos, a demand for dignity that is an intrinsic part of the human soul. The ability to take up (or put down) a book, to become impassioned about a particular issue and follow it closely, to listen and respond to intrinsic interests within ourselves, to articulate opinions at odds with authority, is essential to our human dignity. But these are nearly impossible to replicate in an environment of homogeneous and predetermined content, and where achievement is measured as content mastery.

Dialectic doesn’t yield results we can benchmark, and so the teen’s desire for dignity and dialectic runs head to head with our social demand for equality of outcomes. And when any learning innovation is ultimately judged by the same measures of standard aptitude, then we are not only suppressing that dignity, we are telling ourselves it doesn’t exist. Even in praising the march toward equality, Fukuyama warned that “we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts.”

How to restore the balance of thymos in the teen soul? Families with adult children may have a clue. When the years of tests, grades and admissions have passed, individuals go back to being individuals. Will they visit a library? Read the news? Express concern for others? To start seeing your teen as a human, imagine ahead a few years. When all of the contents of required curricula are forgotten, will the roots of dignity and intellectual curiosity remain? If you’re not sure, it’s time to start planting the seeds.

The Corridor Myth in Teen Education

When we were still trying to make a go of MOGwee Inc (a private, C- corporate aiming to create a marketplace of one-on-one, inspiring chat), my colleagues and I believed that creative, inspiring, one-on-one chats would find a home inside of secondary schools. I personally wrote to more than 400 secondary social studies teachers in Arlington, Bethesda, Brooklyn, Palo Alto, Austin and Ann Arbor-- cities where I thought, if anywhere, teachers would be pushing students to chat with a Khmer Rouge survivor, or with a first-time Afghan voter, or with an Ebola-treating medic.

I tried reaching ambitious high-schoolers from multiple angles-- from their Boy and Girl Scout troops to their churches to their school administrators and parents-- only to be pushed back with the same messages. That wouldn't fit into our curriculum. We really don't have time. My son's so busy with sports and clubs. His APs are taking all his time. Would there be any credit for doing this? Translation: School defines what teenagers prioritize, not teens.

The rhetoric of secondary education: We are preparing young people to get into college.

The myth of secondary education: There is only one way forward. The smartest and most ambitious teens believe they are moving down a narrow, segmented corridor with many bolted doors; they must satisfy without question the demands of every gatekeeper to advance to the next segment of the corridor. As they advance through each door, the inane and discontinuous demands of each gatekeeper are apparent. But that doesn't deter them, especially if they and their parents are aspiring and hard-working. PSAT? check. National Merit? check. AP tests? check. SAT? check. Entry essays about self-awareness and changing the world? check.

Teens believe they are moving along a narrow corridor,
divided in segments with bolted doors between. To pass
to the next segment, they must fulfill the tasks
assigned by the gatekeeper. 

Talking to 20-somethings casts a new light on the problems that teen tunnel-vision creates down the road. Within one or two years of high school graduation, many young people are caught off guard by the question of what they will do with themselves; the same adults who have given them no agency in their schedule, classes, reading, suddenly expect an inspired life-decision. Many move through college in a continuing auto-pilot of ticking-boxes, satisfying requirements, trying to keep parents and instructors happy. A few years later they see that even happy parents and instructors have no further guidance, no idea how the next leap will work.

And it's the later-20-somethings who have taken off their blinders, cast a glance back along the path they traveled, and realize that they could have come to the place where they're standing now by a thousand different ways. The corridor is a fiction. Getting out would have been as easy as taking a step to the side. And outside the corridor is a vast field to run, to zig-zag, to tumble down or to surge in any direction.

I have offered this metaphor to school administrators and students to try to visualize a behavior that I think is harming our young people. I don't believe that teens are inherently narrow-minded and self-constraining-- quite the opposite. This is a learned behavior at odds with the instinctive rebellious, sarcastic, destructive, creative, risk-taking nature of teens. But the corridor is a socially revered construct, which adults having emerged from it, disillusioned, go on to reconstruct for their own children. How do many young adults stay on their parents' health insurance? Go to college. What kinds of expenses are eligible for tax-preferred college savings accounts? Full-time enrollment at an accredited university. When could college savings accounts provide for housing? When the young person is full-time enrolled at college. When HR officers click the drop-down menu to identify your highest level of education attained, and there are only 3 or 4 options, what is the baseline she's looking for? A 4-year college degree.

Is it any wonder, then, that our brightest, most ambitious young people are collectively brainwashed from about 14-25, believing their lives to be a narrow corridor? And parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, whether they really believe the myth or not, carefully maintain and rationalize it. We are building a foundation. They are learning how to learn. They are learning to take responsibility. They are becoming leaders and thinkers. Few will say that the corridor itself infantilizes young people, removes agency, risk, consequences, and any interaction with the real world. Baby hawks and polar bears are more prepared for the roles they will have to play as grown-ups than our young people.

Breaking the corridor-illusion is not about exposing children to risk or 'leaving them behind', it's really about breaking the monopolistic hold of universities on the American imagination and the American income. It's about calling college what it is--a consumer product. It's about admitting that teens are really very unique and will naturally move in a million different directions when given the opportunity. Secondary education is not a corridor, because by the time young people are 14, 15, 16, it gets harder and harder to argue credibly that there are universal standards, universally useful knowledge. It's a field-- wide and rolling -- with possibilities that parents, teachers and counselors can't anticipate. And mentoring young people to find their own zig-zagging paths is something more difficult, but necessary, to raise capable adults.