Introduction- How Social Studies is Treated in the School System and Why it is Important to Teach in Schools

Welcome to my blog! This is my first post on the topic of teaching and learning effective social studies instruction in 21st century schools. As a future teacher, it is my duty to teach meaningful, powerful, and purposeful social studies instruction, and I hope to learn new methods to accomplish this through the course of my blogs, in which I will share my findings.
For my first post, I want to address how social studies is viewed in most public school systems. I came across an article recently called "Why Schools Must Bring Social Studies Back," in which it addresses the poor outlook on social studies instruction in the school systems. According to the article, social studies (geography, history, civics, and economics), especially in elementary schools, has taken second place to reading, mathematics, and science. This is partly due to the testing system in most states, in which students are mainly tested on these three "R's."
With social studies on the back-burn in school systems, this raises the question of why social studies should be taught and studied in schools and why social studies is so vital to young students' lives. Many people do not realize that effective social studies instruction is a necessity for producing responsible and active citizens in our society. Students need to know how our government works, how our economy works, what our nation is founded upon, how events or issues have shaped our country over time, and how our country relates to other countries. These are all essential ideas that every citizen of the United States needs to learn, and this learning should start at the ground level. As a future teacher, it is my job to participate in the progressive learning process of my students and teach them what is needed for their grade level to further their learning progress. If I do not do my part in effectively teaching social studies instruction, then each child will not understand what is needed for the next grade level and will fall behind.
Understanding the need to teach social studies instruction in the schools and to focus on it more than it has been focused on is what I believe to be the first step in teaching meaningful, purposeful, and powerful social studies instruction. Over the course of my blog posts, I will hopefully accomplish the full idea of what it means to be an effective social studies teacher and what it means to truly teach social studies in a meaningful, purposeful, and powerful way.
Link to article: http://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-ed-social-studies-gets-more-respect-from-state-board-of-ed-20150102-story.html