Define Social Studies

1. Define social studies? Critically examine the status of social studies in secondary school curriculum in India. Social studies deal with the relationship between the people living in the society. In the school curriculum, along with the other subjects, social studies is also one of the subject, in fact we are dealing with it even before school. One first social institution is the family, and then only the school comes into the picture. In the family the interaction with family members socializes the child. That means if we want to arrive at meaningful understanding about ourselves, we have to think about our past (history), the place where we residing (geography), our wants and desires (psychology) and financial support to withstand (economic) and the government which is safeguarding us (politics), and culture and tradition which influenced our life (anthropology) etc, the whole social studies in the integrated subject with indistinguishable aspects of History + Geography + Sociology + Economics + Political Science. Hence we can define social studies something related to any of the above aspects viz people and their relation with other, how they work together at different levels and how politically and economically they are interdependent.

So social studies do not include about human beings but devoted to a study of the life of the people with reference to and in relation with the context of the society where one lives.

Status of social studies in secondary school curriculum:-

All over India social studies is a formal subject included in our secondary school curriculum. The objective of teaching social studies is to make individual to adjust with the society. But it is not achieving this through its teaching because social studies curriculum is

a. Emphasizing much on acquisition of information compared to the development of critical and analytical thinking. b. It does not adequately represent the discipline dealing with human being