*blinkblink*

[jarandhel]

I feel like the world's biggest idiot right now, as I just now realized something about a group of classes I took in school that should have been patently obvious while taking them.

Did anyone else reading this not realize consciously that "Social Studies" was actually concerned in its curriculum with teaching about the different societies and cultures of the world? I had always lumped it in my head as history and geography put together, since that was usually what actually got taught, but I just saw it mentioned specifically in a text on theories of education, and the context it was being used in made its name click together with what it was actually supposed to focus on.

I wonder why they didn't really make that focus more apparent, in the classes I took by that name? I might have paid more attention to it, if I thought of it in those terms at the time, rather than simply perking up whenever the chapters on mythology rolled around.

Then again, maybe not... the actual lessons would still have included fun little things like learning all about different climates from rainforest to tundra that would have had a better place in a general science or earth sciences class, and you can really only hear that stuff so many years in a row before your brain starts to tune it out.

Comments

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

History isn't just names, dates, and wars either.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Tell that to the people who taught it to me. The concept of teaching history through stories, or even of history being more than a collection of names, dates, and sterile events devoid of emotion or larger context has largely been forgotten in this area, I think.

[animelily.livejournal.com]

I've been fortunate to have a series of great history teachers. It's really spurred my interest in history. Most of them didn't care if I remembered dates or not, but I better well have understood the culture at the time and the reasons behind the conflict that formed. The only real reason for knowing dates was to know what ALSO happened that year. Everything needed some perspective.