Why Social Education and Not HaSS?

A number of universities are using the term ‘Social Education’ for their pre-service teacher courses. Also, the excellent and long-standing journal of the National Council for the Social Studies in the US is called “Social Education”.

In the ACARA documentation, our learning area is called Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS). This is the current nomenclature for a broad social education.

There is a long history in Australia for the term Social Education. The Social Educators Association of Australia (SEAA), now known as the Social and Citizenship Educators Association of Australia (SCEAA), has existed since 1982, and has long argued in favour of a holistic view of society that allows students to understand the interconnections that exist. In Queensland the term was used in the development of the P-10 curriculum of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A Years 8-10 draft syllabus for Social Education was trialled around the state from 1990 - 1993 but was abandoned due to the move to a national curriculum which resulted in the learning area of Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE)