Students learning the traditional curriculum (mostly) in Social Studies

A press release by the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) suggests students are learning traditional approaches in the social studies. According to their website, "CIRCLE is based in the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Carnegie Corporation of New York." this study employed a democratic and a republican polster to ask students of middle school and high school, what did their classrooms emphisize in their social studies classes.

• 45% -- The Constitution or the US system of government and how it works
• 30% -- Great American heroes and the virtues of the American system of government
• 25% -- Wars and military battles
• 11% -- Problems facing the country today
• 9% -- Racism and other forms of injustice in the American system
• 5% -- Other, all of the above, or don’t know

Clearly the top three are part of the traditional curiculum, the report says very traditional as though we are teaching aristocracy, patriarchy, and theocracy. Nevertheless we see that 20% of students are getting a problems or a social reconstructionist curiculum. If students get the full range of courses as identified above, I really don't have a problem with them being exposed to the 20%. If they are given a good fact base and start off with some patriotic teaching, I see no problem complicating that understand with probems based teaching. What might well be the case, however is that at many schools, no one really represents the 20%, and at other schools the problems approach and social reconstructionism is the dominant theme, even creeping into the attitudes around the fact based approaches (how the Constitution works and the Wars). Now I doubt this in the case of wars. People who really don't like war coulnd't sustain a curruculum of military history and have students come away and think they learned military history rather than "the problems facing American leaders." As I have mentioned before, lots of social studies teachers are coaches, they embrace winning, competition, struggle, effort, and the rest of those ideas anathema to the social reconstrcutionists. Many times I see that a teacher known to his students as "coach" has no books besides those dedicated to the American Civil War and World War II. So my tendency is not to believe that the 20% is anything more than one fifth of classroom experiences. This poll tends to agree with my own experience and to quantify that experience. Not to worry, I'll be on my guard againt been uncritically accepting just because it confirms my own views.