My husband and I have a particular kind of dinner table conversation that probably doesn’t happen in most households. He’s an independent college counselor. I’m a history and geography teacher. When we start talking about graduation requirements and college entrance expectations, the evening tends to go long.
One conversation in particular has stuck with me. We were looking at Georgia’s public high school graduation requirements: 4 credits of science, 4 credits of math, 4 credits of language arts, and 3 credits of social studies. Three. For history, government, geography, and economics combined.
I understand the impulse. The push toward STEAM education has been building for years, and there’s nothing wrong with prioritizing science and math. But somewhere along the way, social studies got quietly moved to the back of the line. And I think we are now living with the consequences of that decision.
What Gets Lost When We Cut Social Studies
Georgia is not alone in this. Across the country, social studies has been squeezed whether through fewer required credits, less instructional time in elementary and middle school, or less emphasis in college entrance requirements. The message students receive, whether we intend it or not, is that this subject doesn’t matter as much as the others.
But here’s what actually gets lost when students don’t study history, government, and geography with any real depth: they don’t learn how their government works. I’m not talking about just the textbook version, but the mechanics of it. How a bill becomes a law. How local government affects their daily lives in ways federal policy never will. How the Constitution has been interpreted and reinterpreted across centuries of argument. Without that foundation, the machinery of democracy is opaque, and what is opaque is easy to dismiss or distrust.
They don’t develop the geographic literacy to understand a world that is more connected than ever. When students can’t locate countries on a map, can’t explain why certain borders exist, can’t trace the relationship between a region’s history and its present, then they are navigating the 21st century without a map. Literally.
They don’t learn to see themselves as participants in history. They memorize and spit it back out just to pass a test. They don’t realize that they are people whose choices and voices are part of an ongoing story, not passive observers of events that happen to other people in other places.
What John Lewis Understood
Shortly before he died, Representative John Lewis wrote an opinion piece that was published by the New York Times on the day of his funeral. In it, he wrote about democracy not as a fixed condition but as something that requires constant tending. It is something each generation has to actively choose.
He also wrote about history with an urgency that I think about often in my teaching. He reminded readers that people on every continent, across decades and centuries, have wrestled with the same fundamental questions about justice, power, and human dignity. Understanding their struggles is not optional. It is how we find our way through our own.
That is a profound idea. It is also an idea that is very hard to grasp if you have never seriously studied history.
What Homeschoolers Can Do Differently
This is one of the quiet advantages of homeschooling, and of choosing classes outside the constraints of a standard public school curriculum. You are not bound by a state’s minimum credit requirements. You can decide that history matters, that geography matters, that civics matters, and you can give those subjects the time and depth they deserve.
In my classes, social studies is not a box to check. It is the lens through which students learn to understand the world they are about to inherit. They read primary sources and argue with them. They connect what happened 200 years ago to what happened last week. They ask hard questions about power, about borders, about who gets to decide, and they sit with the complexity of the answers.
That is what John Lewis was asking of the next generation. Not memorization. Instead, we must dedicate our time and our mind to active, informed, engaged participation in the ongoing work of democracy.
We can give students that. But first we have to decide it’s worth the time.
If you’d like to learn more about how and why I teach, check out my posts about the woman who inspired me to teach or see how I use big themes instead of timelines in my history classes.