GENERAL EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES
by Albert William Levi '32. American Council on Education, Washington, D. C., 1948. pages, $3.50.
This is a report of how some 25 colleges participating in a cooperative study of general education went about designing a twoyear course in the social studies. Social scientists and those concerned with general education should find the whole book most profitable reading, but two phases of the work should be of particular interest to them.
Especially good are the inventories, An Inventory of Social Understanding and An Inventory of Beliefs about Post-war Reconstruction, which are discussed and analyzed in detail in the first half of the book. The study recognized that students do not come to the social studies classroom with blank minds but with all kinds of prejudices, biases and prior value-judgments and that it was necessary for the teacher to become cognizant of these if he were to make constructive provision for dealing with them in the teaching-learning situation. Consequently, inventories were devised to canvas the understandings and beliefs of young people and were administered to the students in the colleges cooperating in the study. Some of the results of this survey are quite startling. Every social science teacher owes it to himself to read the material for the many implications it might have for his own work.
The course of study outline and the extensive reading list which cover some seventy pages in the book should provide many helpful suggestions to the college instructor in the social sciences.
It is indeed encouraging to note that more and more social scientists are coming to be- lieve that the problems facing students are at once economic, political, sociological, psy- chological, and historical, and that if the young persons are to consider these naturally and in their wholeness, social scientists from all different fields must work together. If this book made no other contribution, it would well be worth the reading for what it has to say about a general approach to social studies instruction on the college level.
