The View from Afar

It’s circular reasoning to argue understandings are considered enduring because they have been popular and popular because they endure. History is littered with popular bad ideas. “Separate but equal” was once popular. Slavery denounced in lessons today might have been considered an enduring understanding in the 1859 social studies frameworks. Imagine teachers required to use then modern pedagogical techniques to drill slavery into yesteryear’s inquiring and eager young minds.

Popularity only means beliefs are well–known. Popularity offers neither validation nor justification. Modern packaging of bad ideas won’t make them any more significant.

Unexamined popular traditions embedded into frameworks don’t offer students paths to determine their origin or why they have value. Platitudes aren’t principles. Beliefs aren’t principles. Clichés aren’t principles. What the frameworks assume to be principles are convenient fictions used to avoid principles. They don’t explain why notions matter or justify them with reasoning others could follow and possibly accept as their own.

To earn cachet as principles, ideas with potential grow from wisdom distilled from hard experience. Patterns that appear significant are then projected into hypothetical futures. Some imagined futures would be silly — Utopian models that collapse, unworkable even in dreams. Others show potential. Those that stand up against both the past and future serve as acting principles until fresh experience demonstrates the need to find something better.

The frameworks fail to establish persuasive connections with other cultures or individuals and vice versa. Students caught in frameworks multi–cultural moral relativism are left unarmed to defend against criticism by other cultures. The frameworks celebrate multicultural differences even as it wrongly presumes cross-cultural experience is uniform and enduring.

Revalidation is the responsibility of every individual. Social Studies Key understandings go beyond culture. Each generation is obliged to revalidate the principles accepted as fundamental by previous generations in light of more recent experience. It is too important a task to be assigned to elite experts. The frameworks offer no path other than habit for a student to deduce their value or revalidate for the current generation their importance. Revalidation is not even a consideration.

Any worthwhile framework would teach the principle behind the enduring understanding. Students would revalidate the principle that validates the understanding. The frameworks should ask, “Why are traditional understandings foundational?” That they don’t ask sends the message that the framework designers don’t know.