I’ll never forget my only late nights of freshman year. Whether it was cramming for a Western Humanities test or putting the finishing touches on our most important paper of the quarter, my social studies class was the source of all my panic attacks and undue amounts of stress. There was an endless stream of work, none of which I found particularly meaningful. It was the worst time I had ever had in a social studies class. I couldn’t even blame my teacher: it wasn’t her choice to spend two months on random trivia about Greece and Rome. Nothing could be worse than Western Humanities.
Except, apparently, not having Western Humanities.
When the social studies department announced that it was replacing its last European history course with a decentralized class on world history, I immediately jumped to defend my old nemesis. Even if I hated it, Western Humanities did serve an important role: it taught freshmen how to handle crazy workloads. The sophomore U.S. history courses emphasize critical thinking over learning and memorizing facts, and most electives aren’t available until junior year. If the most preparatory class in the social studies curriculum suddenly vanished, replaced with a big-picture class centered on loosely defined “global themes,” how would any underclassmen be prepared for the type of work they would have to face later on?
I also hated the whole idea of cutting Europe out of the curriculum entirely. European history might be filled with dictatorship and intolerance, but it also includes brilliant innovators and inventions, world-changing philosophers, and a complex political structure. Surely those things are worth learning about just as much as underrepresented cultures like those of the Native Americans.
However, after talking with social studies department chair James D’Amico, I came to realize that these changes are not the only ones taking effect in the department. Left on its own, the replacement of Western with Global Themes would be a disaster. But D’Amico is planning a bunch of other big changes that will help balance out the downsides.
Firstly, D’Amico is proposing an AP European History class to the Board of Education. This would address the problem of completely ignoring Europe. Also, Global Themes is not designed to replace Europe or memorizing facts entirely. The useless stuff, like what year the Holy Roman Empire collapsed or the exact differences between Voltaire and Montesquieu, has been replaced with content from other continents and time periods. But there will still be formal tests, and D’Amico assured me that certain aspects of European history will still be covered.
Europe is also going to get a major boost at the middle school level. Currently, middle school kids have to sit through three straight years of in-depth U.S. history, memorizing trivia that simply isn’t necessary in the age of Google. That’s supposed to be blown up within the next few years, replaced with a more general history of the West that would include basic information that would be covered in Western Humanities.
Still, there’s one part of this grand redesign that bothers me. All these changes show how much the social studies classes are interconnected. But if that’s the case, making changes one at a time will cause a lot of confusion. For instance, this year’s freshman class will be deprived of basic European history. They aren’t taking Western and never took the new middle school course. How many of them will take AP Euro with no background knowledge in European history? Plus, what will happen to sophomore APUSH if sometime in the future incoming sophomores never took US History because of the middle school changes?
The best way to implement these changes is all at once. Otherwise, the puzzle will never be fully solved.