Essential Foundations, Goals and Themes of Social Studies Curriculum in Primary School based on Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Philosophy for Children(P4C) Program

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the critical theory of Horkheimer and p4c program in order to present a program for educating critical thinking in social studies curriculum. The main question has objected important capacities of two approaches for educating critical thinking in social studies curriculum. To meet so, foundations as well as goals in the first place, and themes in the second place has been presented. The former has been taken into action by synthetic methodology and the latter by deductive methodology. Deduction of foundations rest on four aspects called ontology, anthropology, epistemology and axiology and the hard core is p4c program.In this paper was argued that the goals underlying the two approaches contribute to posing the goals which include educating activist citizen, educating personal and social responsibility morale, the ability for establishing true social relationships, growing the ability of conscious and logical criticism of social acts, growing the ability of judging the aim and functions of social institutes, education thinking comprehension in social problems. And finally Essential themes are: to recognize basic social concepts, knowing the reason why these concept should be explicit, getting to know with effective social institutes, to recognize effective social factors, to recognize natural and unnatural factors on destiny of society, getting to know with criterion and its function an judging, distinguishing between personal and social aims.