I've pulled some passages describing events in or around the year 1916:

As the social sciences organized, however, they increasingly rejected this view of a close kinship with history. By the 1920s, as Dorothy Ross points out, a disengagement from historicism was fully under way across all of the social science disciplines.31 In fact, social scientists now often defined themselves by drawing attention to what they argued were the shortcomings of historical thinking. Historians, they said, were given to literary narrative and romance, while social scientists were devoted to factual analysis and reality. The latter was empirical science, the former a kind of sentimental humanism. No longer justified after the horrific experience of World War I, this indulgent historicism—as the social scientists saw it—reflected a flawed evolutionary faith that counted on social ills' giving way to the slow drift of historical progress. Thus, the study of history, if overdone, tended to cover over social problems rather than work toward their solution.

[snip]

the most outspoken and determined opponents of history education emerged from a loose network of new professionals whom historians came to refer to as "educationists." Historians applied this designation very broadly, often with disapproval, to education officials and faculty in schools of education who, to varying degrees, believed that the disciplinary framework governing the school curriculum should be jettisoned and replaced by one organized around pressing (or mundane) problems in the immediate social environment. In the words of one influential educationist, David Snedden, the purpose of schooling was not primarily to stimulate the intellectual development of individual minds—as history and the other disciplines advocated—but instead should be to make students "fit to carry on the group life." Schools, that is, were agencies that existed to serve the social order; and this meant that both the goals and the substance of education should be specified through an analysis of immediate "social necessities," and not by reference to the structure and substantive concerns of disciplinary learning. In practice, Snedden argued, the goal should be to replace courses in disciplines such as mathematics and history with studies focusing on aspects of daily life such as vocational skills and hygienic habits.37 Looking back, the historian Richard Hofstadter described the efforts of the educationists as an attempt to produce a "de-intellectualized" school curriculum; and given the views of Snedden and his allies, this seems a fair appraisal of their intent.38

Although Snedden and like-minded educationists sought to disestablish disciplines altogether, their top priority was to eliminate history from the curriculum.39 If that could not be fully accomplished, they hoped at least to transform school history into something close to what Snedden called "contemporary social science." Listening to Snedden speak about history education, the Cornell historian George Burr observed that "this seems much like history with the history left out." And so it was. Increasingly, educationists such as Snedden—most of whom identified themselves as progressive pragmatists—interpreted John Dewey's call to "live forward" to mean that the past should be rejected and shed rather than rediscovered and assimilated.

the NEA enters the picture

In 1918, the cause of the educationists was given powerful impetus by the report of the NEA's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE). The leading question before this commission was what should be the mission of the high school, given that at least some secondary education was fast becoming universal and that educational planners increasingly had to take account of "large numbers of pupils of varying capacities, aptitudes, and social heredity, and destinies in life." In short, what conception should rule the school curriculum under conditions of mass education? Answering this question in a report that came to be known as the Cardinal Principles, the CRSE pronounced that, henceforth, the governing mission of the high school no longer was to engender "intellectual power" but instead should be to fit the student for democratic life "through activities designed for the well-being of his fellow members and society as a whole." To this end, disciplinary frameworks should be subordinated to and reoriented toward supporting seven objectives said to be essential to the good order of social life: "health," "command of fundamental processes," "worthy home-membership," "vocation," "citizenship," "worthy use of leisure," and "ethical character."41 Obviously, these aims reflected a very different and rival educational vision from the disciplined-based one advanced earlier by Eliot's Committee of Ten and the AHA's Committee of Seven. To the present day, these two contending points of view—one focusing on intellectual development and the other emphasizing social behavior—continue to oppose one another in a long-unresolved debate about the central purpose of schooling in the United States.42

By endorsing the idea of a curricular domain called social studies, the CRSE gave educational standing to a concept that existed concretely as little more than a phantom presence. Much later, in 1938, John Dewey was still trying to answer the question "What Is Social Study?" while warning against attempts to give it too definite a meaning.43 Indeed, its appeal to school administrators may have been the operational latitude that the social studies rubric permitted in labeling courses for academic credit. In the social studies dispensation, they did not have to be governed by standard usage, as was necessary when designating a course as, say, "algebra" or "ancient history."

This is why New York state has a 'social studies' standard.

Not a history standard.


HistoryOfTeachersAndNCTM
CharlesBabbage

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