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Innovative Social Science Education in the Classroom

America's political and social education is alarmingly poor, after all, the most popular President in 50 years is Ronald Reagan.

The net represents a chance to greatly improve people's political and social science education.

All too often in high school and college teachers and professors are stuck with a text that properly address a subject, or required a text because only one or two chapters were relevant.

Now, with the net, we can change that! We can expand the scope of social issues, as well as coming up with new perspectives by teaching HTML, the language of the web in social science classes, and require students to write a webpage.
When enough students building webpages, there are bound to be some with new, thought provoking ideas. A few million students can come up with many more thought provoking ideas than a handful of textbook writers. With the pages written from classes, teachers, professors,or educational institutions can compile indexes of the best pages. Initially they will supplement the course curriculum, later, as the number of first rate pages come out it will cover the curriculum better than conventional texts.

HTML is easy to learn!
HTML is basically a word processing language and easy to learn, no other language is all that is needed for most non-business uses. To increase the interest at your school, get an article published in your school paper. Anything new on the internet will likely be considered newsworthy, so you might be able to get something in your local newspaper, TV or radio station, and if you do get on TV, you might be able to show this idea to 100,000 people at once.

There are also advantages to having students build pages at the secondary level, it will motivate and teach them how to make their points better, and give them a better way of expessing their anger than going to a Marilyn Manson concert.

There is no reason we can't continue growing exponentally, until schools use cybertexts all around the developed world! Another advantage is that this media is not controlled by the millionaires who run the media now, so it will be impossible to control, and it will encourage independent thought.

How to talk to professors about this, even if you've never gone to college.

Since I haven't been to college in years I didn't have many contacts. I got a few professors' names from friends, and I got others by looking through the college catalogs. If you don't have the money to buy them, skim through them for courses at the school bookstore. When you find the right courses, find the professor. In a very small school, you will problably find the office easily, but in a larger school, you will probably have to check the schedule to find the class that professor teaches in, and then ask the professor where and when his office hours are.

Some of the departments you think are cool, might not be, for example: half the courses the sociology department at a University where I live are crimonology courses, although I'm sure this isn't typical. Women Studies, Afro-American Studies, and Chicano Studies Departments are good candidates. If all the courses in a department seem fairly enlightened, the departmant chair could be the best person to talk to.

A few words about innovation:
It's scary!

It's scary to stick your neck out for a new idea because if it is new, intially people don't normally believe you. Many people won't believe you until you've prove your concept and replicated often enough for it to become commonplace, so you have to deal with people who think you're nuts, but let's face it, if we do everything the same way we've always done it, we're likely to get the same lousy results!

A final word about innovation:
A young girl was watching her mother bake a ham, the girl asked her mother why she was cutting off the ends of the ham. Her mother said, "because that's the way my mother cooked them." So, the little girl asked her grandmother why she cut off the ends of the ham. Her grandmother said,"because that's the way my mother used to cook them." So the girl asked her great grandmother why she did it. Her great grandmother said, "because I only had small pans."

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