Social science is a collection of disciplines, each of which examines human behavior from a different perspective and has its own particular techniques, modes of expression, and history. The social-science disciplines employ the evidence-based, hypothesis-testing, model-building approach of science in general to investigate social phenomena, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and they share the values characteristic of all science. Being literate in science does not require expertise in anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and the other social sciences individually, any more than it requires expertise in astronomy, zoology, ecology, and the other natural sciences individually. Scientific literacy does require, however, a broad-based knowledge across all of these disciplines. Therefore, instead of focusing on the special features of the individual social-science disciplines, the benchmarks in this chapter delineate what students at various levels of development ought to know about how social science illuminates human behavior.

The benchmarks that follow are aimed at getting students to understand human social behavior, not at fostering social action or socializing future citizens. In everyday life, scientific knowledge is seldom essential or sufficient for guiding social action. Nevertheless, if scientific knowledge of how human society works is widely shared, it can contribute to better personal and public decision making.

Exploring the findings of social science requires teachers and students to be both the observers and the observed. Students are being asked to observe the human drama critically and dispassionately, but at the same time they—and their family members, friends, neighbors, schoolmates, teachers, shopkeepers, and local authority figures—are also subject matter. It takes time for students to learn how to shift roles. And there is a natural tendency on the part of students of almost any age to reject or ridicule ideas that seem to violate the mores of their major peer group, and that tendency needs to be taken into account.

For their part, teachers should try to lead students to the kind of understanding of human behavior that derives from science. The role of the teacher is to provide a context for multiple perspectives in a democratic society. One useful approach, especially in the upper grades, is for teachers of different subjects to participate in seminars in which students and faculty explore social behavior from a variety of perspectives. In the lower grades, organizing learning around broad questions rather than subject-matter domains can make it easier to meet this objective. Reasoning with statistics is especially important for making sense out of social phenomena. Therefore it is useful to get mathematics and social studies teachers to work together to help all students understand social applications of probability and statistics. Students should also come to realize that insight into human behavior derives from many sources, including the biological, behavioral, and social sciences and also literature, history, art, philosophy, and religion.

One of the central questions of human existence concerns how genetic inheritance, social inheritance, and life experience interact in making people what they are. How much control do individuals have over what they become? The conclusion reached in science is that genetics and culture interact in complex ways to influence what individuals can become but that the range of possibilities is so great that each person can shape his or her own life to a significant degree.

In considering the impact of culture on human behavior, one of the most sensitive issues that arises is social class. Historically, the class into which people are born has determined what their lives can be, although in today's world, skill, wealth, profession, and other factors may be more important than lineage in determining social status. Even where there is greater class mobility, the influence of birth status continues to be a significant factor. Analysts often divide citizens into lower, middle, upper middle, and upper classes (and sometimes use even finer distinctions) based on parent income, occupation, and education. Students in the upper grades should actually examine how those and other socioeconomic indices are determined and become familiar with their uses and limitations. School can help students understand that one can be proud of one's own cultural origins without having to denigrate other cultures. Religious, racial, language, and national prejudices are deep, generational, and not easily eliminated, but at least students can realize that those attitudes are part of everyone's cultural inheritance, and they can become familiar with the effects such attitudes can have on human behavior.

The benchmarks treat standards for defining crime and assigning punishment as cultural variables. This approach is controversial, for many people believe that there are absolute standards for acceptable and unacceptable human behavior. And, of course, students themselves are learning what is and is not acceptable behavior in different settings and are having to face the consequences of their own, sometimes unacceptable, behavior. This fact may be used to enhance the relevance of studying behavior in the context of culture, as long as the scientific study of behavior is not turned into an occasion for moralizing.

The emphasis in the first years of schooling should be on helping children to become aware of the range of society's implicit rules. Students can begin by finding out what the rules are in different classrooms and families, observing how children respond to the rules and recording their findings in drawings and notes. Discussions can focus on how the rules and behaviors resemble or differ from those in their own classroom or family. Such observations should introduce students to the idea of cultural diversity (though of course no such term need be used at this stage), and this impression should be strongly reinforced by the stories they read.

The curriculum should broaden the perception that students have of cultural diversity and shift their attention from observing and describing rules and behavior to considering, from a scientific viewpoint, some reasons for such rules and behavior to exist. Contrasting the common national culture of the United States with other national cultures, or with American subcultures, or with the American culture in former times can be particularly helpful. Research suggests that students are often surprised and puzzled by the actions of people in the past and so become interested in why people behave as they do in the present.

Students should begin to understand more fully why people in different situations and other cultures, past and present, might behave or have behaved differently. Data on economics, education, employment and other demographic variables should now be studied and interrelated to deepen student understanding of the effects of social forces on behavior. Students should use graphs, probability theory, and mathematical modeling to make projections about graduation, jobs, family size, etc. Student projections can be compared to official projections as a basis for discussion of both methods and results.

Data for student analysis can come from census and other statistical databases and from their own collection efforts. Students can conduct careful surveys and, what may be especially interesting to them, they can interview older members of their families to collect their notions of what social, personal, or technological factors influenced their lives the most. Based on the testimony of grandparents, parents, and children their own age, students may get a sense of how much change can occur in a lifetime; they may then attempt to predict 20 years or so into the future and then compare their predictions with one another.

Descriptive and statistical information about different cultures can be used to stimulate discussion about how circumstances, beliefs, and patterns of behavior are linked. The challenge is to help students make sense of behavior patterns that may seem puzzling out of the context of cultural diversity. Although students might be able to describe cultural influences on other people's thinking, the tougher goal is for them to see what influences have an effect on their own ideas and behavior.

Students may have trouble accommodating the many meanings of social group. The term includes any set of people who regularly spend time together for any reason, invented classifications of people who have mutual interests (such as blue-collar workers or Southerners), and groups that people deliberately and formally join or are assigned to (such as college sororities, military units, scouts, street gangs, or the Shriners). Clearly these are groups in very different senses. Nonetheless, for the purpose of understanding the general consequences of group affiliation, these distinctions make little difference. Indeed, the main point may be that no matter how groups are defined, there are certain common patterns in the relationships between those who belong and those who do not.

Group membership implies some sense of commonality for members and thereby some sense of difference from nonmembers. Often members of a group tend to stereotype outsiders, and nonmembers tend to stereotype the group's members. Group membership does reveal something useful about individuals, but it is a mistake to attribute all of a group's real and imagined properties to every individual who belongs to it. The task for science education is to alert students to the prevalence and error of stereotyping, without disparaging the value of group membership.

Instruction should use children's experiences to help them make explicit their intuitive notions about behavior in groups. Students can identify their own groups (family, classroom, scouts, or sports team) and indicate how one becomes a member of each. They should also know some of the things that members have in common with each other. Issues of adoption in families, exclusion from groups based on race or sex, and other potentially difficult issues might arise in these discussions, and they should be handled deftly. The school should be a model of inclusiveness, reinforcing the openness that children this age generally come to school with.

Students can now identify the value that various kinds of social groupings have for their members, including the shared understandings of what behavior is and is not acceptable. Although the emphasis of their study of group behavior should be generally positive, students at this level are beginning to form cliques and should be aware of what it is like to be excluded as well as to be included. Students should be introduced to the idea of crowd behavior and asked to identify examples from their own experience of individuals in groups saying and doing things they never would say or do alone.

Case studies and simulations can be used to examine how groups can influence attitudes and cause change. Literature also can contribute to students' understanding of group behavior. Appropriate novels, short stories, and plays can be read and discussed, and of course students can themselves write and perform short stories or plays that illustrate some of the ideas being studied. Source material is available on videotape as well.

Students should have the skills to survey community groups to identify types of organizations and their compositions and to interview members to find out what they believe are the benefits of belonging to the groups they do. Historical and contemporary cases can be explored for extraordinary results of group affiliation—say, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Montgomery boycotts, or the Vietnam War. At some point it is important that students examine science itself as a group enterprise—including pooling of resources, use of mutual critique, and shared biases—and all that implies for the nature of science.

Social change happens sometimes in a flash, but more often slowly. The point to raise with students is not whether change is good or bad (it is usually some of each, and in any case different people are apt to judge it differently) or whether it is needed or not (societies need to change over time but they also need stability). What is sought here is an understanding of what kinds of internal and external factors foster social change or influence its character. Another major aim should be to help students to recognize that unless it is imposed by force, social change involves negotiation among different interests—on every level from deciding who does the dishes to organizing a neighborhood activity to working out international treaties. Developing such an understanding takes time—time for students to encounter and examine social change in a variety of present and historical contexts.

The way children adapt to change in their own lives can influence how they understand and relate to social change in later life. They can be helped to examine changes that affect their lives, including those they expect (moving to the next grade) and those they don't (moving away).

To a large extent, social structure can be characterized by its rules, formal and informal. Social change typically entails negotiation of some rules. Children know that breaking a rule carries a penalty, even though they may also think that some rules are unfair. They often regard all rules as unchangeable and don't know that rules can be changed through negotiation. Negotiation should be emphasized in classroom management and after-school activities. Students, to some degree, can take part in making school and classroom rules that relate to procedures, compliance, and rewards or penalties.

Middle-school students can imagine themselves in situations different from their own. Interviews with senior citizens, literary and media accounts of life in times past, simulations, and role playing all provide raw material for discussions about social change. Students can be helped to see that cultural patterns change because of technological innovations, scientific discoveries, and population changes. They can identify social changes that happen gradually as well as those that happen quickly because of natural disasters and wars. Students should also begin to identify aspects of family and community life that have remained relatively constant over generations.

Students at this level can consider how technology has affected mobility and the capacity for crowding in cities. They can use case studies to examine the causes and results of social changes occurring under conditions of close and prolonged contact between two cultures. Students become aware of the complexity of explaining human population patterns such as urban crowding or mobility and can search databases and identify and display trends and relationships.

Gaining an understanding of the concept of social trade-offs may be one of the most important components of a comprehensive education. Because social problems typically involve a variety of factors and interests, it is rare that one solution to a problem will carry all the benefits and avoid all disadvantages. Because increasing some advantages is likely to decrease others, most realistic solutions involve compromise among advantages and disadvantages. If the habit of considering alternatives and their consequences is to be functional for students, they should exercise it in a rich variety of contexts.

Thus the concept of tradeoffs should show up in every part of the curriculum, including social studies, literature, physical education, technology, and science. Student decision making in the classroom, student government, clubs, newspaper, yearbook, community service, etc. should help them learn the inevitability of tradeoffs and the need to take benefits and costs into account in any proposed action. When people with different interests are involved in solving social problems, compromise is also needed to accommodate their different perceptions of advantages and disadvantages. As students mature, they can consider social tradeoffs in broader and more sophisticated situations. The principles continue to apply, but there is an increase in the range and complexity of contexts and the difficulty of making decisions.

Life is full of choices, even for very young children. Many choices are made for them, of course, by parents and teachers. Telling children some of the reasons that particular choices were made can show them what counts as explanation and get them into the habit of looking for reasoned decisions. But children do make many decisions for themselves—and should be encouraged to anticipate the possible consequences of their choices.

Children can improve their decision-making skills and apply them in new and varied situations. The decisions they make and the decisions others make in their behalf can serve as the subject for discussions about tradeoffs Discussions should include examining possible options, considering how various options will affect others, identifying possible risks, and deciding which risks, if any, are worth taking.

Students at this level are very preoccupied by personal and social relationships. Their greatest concerns are usually peer approval and popularity, sexual development and feelings, personal appearance, and the struggle to separate from family and become an individual. They can consider personal and social consequences of individual choices in health (sexual activity, immunization), education (how different course choices limit future options), and popularity (how affiliation with one group might exclude a person from others). Students should assess tradeoffs that occur in the lives of their friends (or their own) and that offer only unwanted choices (such as sexual abstinence and venereal disease).

Students at this age can examine the complexities of decision making and take into account different types of costs (direct, indirect, economic, social, emotional, etc.). They can examine tradeoffs across generations and over great distances (actions taken in one place or time can have costly outcomes elsewhere). They can realize that the people who receive benefits and the people who bear the costs of those benefits are often not the same. Social, environmental, political, technological, and scientific case studies offer a rich foundation for developing decision-making skills.

Political and economic systems evolve to become quite complex, so it's easy to convince ourselves that children cannot possibly understand them. Yet these systems are based upon very simple and basic premises that children can grasp, first mostly in personal terms and later in societal terms. It is important that they do so if they are to be expected to grasp the more complex refinements of these evolved systems as they become older.

When reduced to their simplest terms, political and economic models describe how people organize themselves to satisfy their needs: People tend to live in groups, and so must devise means for living and working together; people have needs, and so must devise means for allowing everyone a fair chance at meeting these needs; people can choose how they will live and work together and how they will go about meeting their basic needs.

Students can participate in student government and take some part in making, interpreting, and even enforcing rules of fair play. Students can visit local, state, and federal government institutions—city council, state legislature, Congress—and compare what these bodies do with what their student council does.

These benchmarks focus on two theoretical economic/political models, here called free-market and central-planning (in lieu of the more usual "market" and "command") to emphasize their theoretical nature. Neither exists in the pure form, though people often speak as though they did. The models are useful for promoting thoughtful analysis of government, in terms of principles and in terms of what works in practice. Discussions of what should be planned and what should be left to market forces can focus attention on issues of efficiency and fairness. As students study local, state, and federal governments and U.S. and world history, they can see that societies have very different ways of deciding what their needs are and how to meet them.

Young children can engage in discussions about rules and fair play. They have a sense of what is and is not fair and are interested in discussion about it. They know about negotiation and compromise when expressed in terms of sharing in decisions. Although still focused primarily on self, they can learn to consider the interest of all in certain circumstances.

At this age, children encounter government systems mostly through the services they receive, such as mail service and police and fire protection. But at this age they are only dimly aware of what a government is. (They might think, for example, that the postman does his job because he likes people to get mail.) Children know that people have jobs, make money to buy things, and that jobs involve making or selling things or performing services. They can make connections between money and goods on the one hand and money and work on the other. They are not ready, however, to conceive of the whole system that relates production to consumption. Children should experience producing, buying, and selling, which can provide the foundation for discussions of more abstract ideas later on. They can learn about the range of jobs that parents and neighbors have through the communications media, invited speakers, and field trips.

Children can develop an understanding of the relationship between pay received and the quantity and quality of work done in any one job. But they have trouble making the connection between the pay received for different kinds of jobs and the amount of goods and services produced. Experience with producing goods from raw materials may be helpful for eventually understanding the larger system. Simulations of economic systems can help students explore money systems and trade. Students should also learn about systems of trade used in different places and by different groups, both past and present.

The free-market and central-planning models provide alternative ways of allocating resources. Although it's too early to ask students to compare the systems, they can have concrete experiences with the problems each model tries to solve—what is to be produced, for whom, by whom, and how? Young children have a strong sense of fairness, which should be taken seriously and used in discussions about rules, jobs, and money.

Focusing on particular issues, such as health care or crime control, students can investigate how various countries answer the basic economic questions: Who decides the answers to basic economic questions, and who decides who gets to decide?

As students examine more complicated cases, they should be challenged to imagine what the pure economic system would be like and to account for why all real-world systems are a mix. They can collect and analyze data from different economic systems. Games and simulations can show them how changing various conditions or making different assumptions would play out over time.

Human beings generally live in groups, voluntarily cooperating and competing with one another. Within the general context of interdependence, however, some social conflict is inevitable—from infants squabbling over toys to adolescent rivalries for friendship to adult constitutional debates and war. Human societies spend much time in negotiating differences—peacefully, heatedly, or violently.

Children are not strangers to conflict. One purpose of education is to help children learn how to deal thoughtfully and constructively with conflict in their own lives. Understanding the nature of social conflict and ways of moderating it can contribute to that end. Such understanding is also important for confronting community, religious, international, interracial, and intercultural conflict. School provides opportunities for students to obtain experience in resolving conflict in positive ways. Social conflict that occurs in school can be examined in ways that will lead to understanding and help students resolve conflict in constructive ways.

Young children experience many conflicts as they go about distinguishing their rights from those of others around them. The simple recognition that others have rights is a significant part of the socialization process. Children need considerable guidance to help them identify when their actions are likely to result in conflict with others and to learn strategies for avoiding it. Providing opportunities for students to explain their point of view can lead to new insights for children and teachers alike. Role playing and discussion of various situations involving conflict may also help.

Children's own conflicts (and stories about those of others) continue to provide a rich source of material for discussion, which should include possible consequences of various ways of resolving conflict. Students can understand the fairness of majority votes, although they may not entirely accept that others' interests are as important as their own. Even when they are on the losing side, students can accept the results of an either/or choice if they believe it was fair, particularly in a class or school election. They want to take part in decision making and are able to negotiate compromises. They also can learn to negotiate from a minority position and try to lobby peers and even adults into supporting their position.

Conflict has more serious consequences now than before and has immediate, as well as long-term, significance. Emphasizing conflict resolution is more important than focusing on the dangers of conflict.

History provides endless examples of conflict, its causes, and its consequences. Adding social and economic analysis to historical narrative helps students better understand both. There is value in studying major episodes of conflict in history, but they should be made more relevant by relating them to more current episodes that have some personal meaning for students.

The purpose here is not to promote any particular view of how nations should work together or to suggest what the balance between national interests and global ones ought to be for the United States or any other country. Rather, students need to become aware of the growing number of ways in which each nation is part of larger political, economic, military, environmental, biological, and technological systems.

In history, geography, and social studies, students ought to discuss the consequences of citizens' ties to religious and ethnic groups that transcend national borders and go farther back in history than the country itself. Whether in the United States or in other nations, nonnative groups are increasingly important elements of society.

Children should have many opportunities to identify meaningful roles for themselves through a variety of personal interactions—in school, at home, and in the community. They can be "helpers" in all of these places—being responsible for classroom duties, picking up after themselves at home, recycling or picking up litter in their environment (and participating in other community-service activities). Children need to see themselves and what they do as important to others—enabling them to notice and appreciate how what others do affects them. They should have experiences in which "everyone must do their part" in order to achieve success—bringing an item for a class project or party, having a role in a class play or other performance, etc. Through interviews and other encounters with community, business, and government workers, children can develop a wider view of the many ways in which people can affect one another.

Children should be encouraged to ask where various products they use come from. Role playing or simulations involving trading goods and services can lead to discussions about problems that arise when bartering is the only way to get what one wants.

Students should continue to have experiences that show their impact on the world around them, such as community-service projects. Students may not know exactly where or how far away various countries are, but they certainly know, through television or even the labels on their clothing, that many different countries exist. Books, films, other media, and direct personal experiences can expand the students' world beyond the borders of their community, state, and country. A variety of activities can familiarize (and fascinate) students with products grown or manufactured elsewhere in the world—many of which they see and use in their everyday lives. And television can show how one country helps another deal with the consequences of a natural (or other) disaster. Schools can provide opportunities to reflect on this information.

The study of geographical differences in climate and natural resources will make the advantages of trade evident. Simulations can involve students in planning the use of available resources for the greatest benefit and making choices about what, how much, and how to produce things to meet wants and needs. Students can trace how policies of market participants or government agencies affect the production and distribution of resources.

The daily newspaper and news weeklies provide good raw material for stimulating fruitful discussions on economic and political models. Trade negotiations, worker migration, balance of payments, productivity, and the like are the focus of much international tension. In analyzing these matters, students should try to understand what is going on rather than judge what is desirable.