What Does It Mean to Teach Social Studies?
Chloe Hunt /
This week, the National Council for Social Studies—the largest professional association dedicated to social studies education—is hosting its 105th annual conference in Washington, D.C. The conference webpage tells attendees, “You will leave the conference with strong strategies for delivering instruction that engages students, the best ways to advocate for the most pressing issues of social studies education, and a network of colleagues to support you throughout the year.”
Naturally, with the NCSS’ conference theme “Because democracy depends on it,” one might expect educational sessions on history, geography, and civics with some soft leftist messaging sprinkled in. However, a closer look at the conference reveals this form of professional development is far beyond neutral social studies pedagogy. Democracy does indeed depend on it—but what version of democracy does the NCSS have in mind?
NCSS conference content is no longer centered around education—it’s practically an ideological boot camp. The conference’s star speaker will be Kimberlé Crenshaw, called the “architect” and “co-editor” of critical race theory. Crenshaw has criticized Republicans’ rejection of CRT as “suffocating democracy” and has led national-level campaigns, hoping to embed CRT into the fabric of American education.
Other speakers include House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who gained notoriety for her inaugural sermon for President Donald Trump.
But it’s not only about the speakers signaling a political agenda. The sessions themselves reek of ideology:
- “Reclaiming Elementary Social Studies Through Critical Literacy, Antiracism, and Storytelling”
- “Working Towards More Abolitionist Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education”
- “Conceiving Reproductive Justice in Social Studies Education”
- “Contending with the Challenges and Possibilities of Climate Change Education in Social Studies”
- “Decolonial Perspectives on Palestine, Indigenous Rights, and Global Justice”
- “Teaching democracy in the dark: Perspectives on social studies education amid a cloud of authoritarianism”
Is this professional development or professional brainwashing? The answer seems clear.
This “social studies conference” prompts us to reexamine the intellectual ethos that guides modern education. At this moment, kids don’t need an overdose of reproductive justice, critical race action civics, or decolonial perspectives. Kids need faith. Faith in America and the American experiment.
We should be worried about the worldview that the NCSS wants teachers to pass along to kids. The NCSS would rather systematically train educators to see America as oppressive and out-to-get-everyone than equip educators and students with the confidence and hope to engage confidently with their communities and understand what America—for generations and generations—has invested in its young.
Uncritical patriotism is the antithesis of an effective social studies education, but what we have now is darkness, followed by pessimism, narratives of oppression, and topped with existential despair.
In public education, thanks to organizations such as the NCSS, this darkness has increasingly become an all-too-consuming attitude toward social studies education. “As social studies educators, we play an integral role in protecting democracy now and in perpetuity,” NCSS President Tina M. Ellsworth wrote. What irony from the organization that seeks to undermine it.
As Robert Pondiscio—senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—put it on his Substack, too many schools and social studies curriculums are consumed by an “unbearable bleakness.” Pondiscio reflects on teaching a civics seminar in a Harlem charter school and passing out invoices detailing the amount that the city and state of New York spent on students’ “free” K-12 education.
The purpose? Remind students that school is their civic inheritance, “a sign that the world might be for them, not against them.” A reminder that behind the scenes, America’s investments into each student’s life are taking place.
“I am all for truth telling,” Pondiscio wrote, “but kids are not getting the full truth. They are getting the bleakest possible version.”
This week, the NCSS will continue replaying this doomed, failure-oriented narrative through its sessions on “troubled times” and “faculty activism.” The long-term result won’t be student engagement. As Pondiscio noted, the result is dejected and unmotivated students, convinced that there’s no reason to invest in a country that hates them.
Kids are less motivated to go to school, period. The key driver? A lack of purpose, quite possibly stemming from overdone, pessimistic narratives that have been shoved down kids’ throats since elementary school social studies education.
Pondiscio concluded with the most important civics lesson kids can learn: optimism, attachment, and patriotism. “Let’s build schools that help them see that the world is not something to withdraw from, but something to join, and a place in which they can flourish.”
Another 7th grade teacher piggybacked on this theme of school as a pathway to civic life. He opened his blog with a joke about the question that every teacher has faced at one point or another: “When am I ever going to use this?” His response? The lessons learned in school aren’t about taking PEMDAS and Shakespearean sonnets to the workforce. What’s learned in school is more important than that.
He argued, what kids are learning in school is as much about about giving kids a way to make sense of the world as it is about content. Social studies, and every lesson, “becomes part of a person’s capacity to navigate life,” giving kids the tools they need to look at the world in an intelligent, thoughtful way.
In this vein, when we give kids nothing but bleakness, darkness, and division, we teach them to look at their futures—and America’s future—through this lens. We’re seeing the first wave of results now—boys falling behind, overall lack of engagement in school, Gen-Zers reporting hatred for America, young people searching for work in other countries. Young people are so angry with the system that they’ve become jaded and uninvested.
This is just the beginning, if we continue letting groups such as the NCSS dictate the narrative for our kids. The NCSS may preach that “democracy depends on it,” but for them, their success depends on framing America in as irredeemable a way as possible, leaving kids as political pawns, rather than civic agents filled with curiosity and hope.
Our students need to learn that the American experiment is not a burden—it’s a complex, faulted promise that requires investment and care. It’s time that social studies classrooms remind kids of their power and agency in fulfilling America’s promise. Teach with hope and courage, rather than disdain.
Unlike the NCSS’ upcoming boot camp, democracy does, indeed, depend on it.
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