Social Studies

I am very interested by social studies in India for children, especially after class today.

Briefly, I’ve been teaching my seventh-graders about dialect, so today we learned the Banana Boat Song (aka Day-o, day-o, daylight come and me want go home…etc.). I was teaching them about the origins of the song, and we had a slight issue when I started talking about the slave trade. Some general confusion ensued, and I entered the realm of teaching world history to my seventh graders.

Afterward, I asked to look at a social studies book for grade 9 (from the teacher), and it had a lot of information about India (which makes sense), but there was almost no history. Instead, it mostly contained information about the different regions of India and seemed to be a primer on physical geography and climate/weather information rather than a text on social studies and history. I also talked to a couple people about their education, and they said that the emphasis was not really on history, with the exception of India’s national liberation struggle and India’s colonial history. He said that, outside of Indian history, they learned about the American Revolution, Russian Revolution, WWI, and WWII, which I find interesting. Of course, one cannot rely solely on one person’s memory of high school education, but I forgot about how wide the common knowledge gap really is here.