Framing the Conversation: Social Studies Education and the Neoconservative Agenda

cons: They really know how to outflank the Left. For years—decades, really—many of us have been calling for educational reform, pointing out the shortcomings of public schooling for its antidemocratic structures and policies, irrelevant and sometimes racist curriculum, and myriad other faults. And social studies teachers and curriculum developers have borne the brunt of much of our criticism. Only a few years ago, I myself decried the “moribund state of social studies” education, arguing that “for most students, social studies is a boring, meaningless subject, usually about dead white males who have little or no relationship to their lives” (Kornfeld and Goodman 1998, 306). Now the Neoconservatives have come along and said much the same thing about social studies education in this country. In Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? (WDSSGW), funded and published in 2003 by the Fordham Institute, editors Lemming and Ellington declare, “The only possible interpretation of the state of social studies education at the turn of the 21st century is that the field is moribund” (2003, i). But here is how they have outflanked us: Their call for reform might at first sound like ours, but they are actually advocating very different kinds of changes. In fact, the reasons they cite for the field’s demise include many of the reforms—which they claim “dominate” the social studies field—for which the Left, over the years, has most strongly advocated: “such politicized and superficial topics as peace studies, the environment, gender equity issues, multiculturalism, and social and economic justice” (Leming and Ellington 2003, ii). These assertions are baffling to those of us who have promoted such reforms. How can they call these issues superficial? And since when have they dominated social studies education? If they have, I certainly have not noticed it. True, we have championed these causes over the years, and we have actually made some inroads in schools and classrooms; but overall, our impact has been far less profound than we would like. And now the authors of WDSSGW want to wipe out even the small gains we have made? Many on the Left would probably even settle for the anachronistic perennialist canon that our calls for reform sought to eliminate, instead of the xenophobic jingoism that the Fordham Foundation advocates replacing it with in this book. The book’s condemnation of social studies education puts the Left in a difficult position. On the one hand, we want to continue to critique the shortcomings of Eurocentric, textbook-driven, teacherlectured, drill-and-kill social studies education that takes place in too many classrooms across the country; on the other hand, the criticism in WDSSGW compels us to defend social studies teachers against this attack from the Right. Many of us have responded in the same way to No Child Left Behind (NCLB). For years, we have been saying that schools have been failing our students and need to change; but now that NCLB threatens to dismantle schools entirely and hand them over to private interests (Kohn 2004), we are all scrambling to defend the schools. No matter how much we criticized them, we never intended for public schools to be destroyed. As Apple writes,

Field of study: Sociology