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The Role Of Social Changes In Public Education

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Introduction What is social change? It is a change within a community; a change in the social relationships. For a society to exist there has to be social relationships. Therefore, for change to exist for the entire society it would have to be within those relationships. When observing and studying social change it is generally a type of psychology termed “social psychology.” According to the American Psychological Association, social psychology is defined as, “the branch of psychology that studies the effect of social variables on individual behavior, attitudes, perceptions, and motives; also studies group and intergroup phenomena” (apa.org, 2016). Without social psychology much of the societal information known to date would not be known. One huge example currently in society is education. In the past several years, public education (kindergarten through twelfth grade) has taken a turn, for what many believe to be the worst. Rather than focus being on a good, solid curriculum for the children to learn, it is focused on test scores. Why? The school gets more funding if (as a student body) high test scores are achieved. This has been a major social change. Additionally, the information studied by the children have changed drastically. I recently worked in an elementary school for Kanawha County Schools and the fifth graders were doing beginners trigonometry, I did not even see a glimpse of trigonometry until high school. I am only twenty- two, a junior in college. This

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