A series of culture wars are being fought in America today;
Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman contend that one key battleground is the
nation's high school texts. The authors argue that today's textbook
controversies, as exemplified in the proposed National Standards
for the Study of United States and World History, reflect changes
in American public philosophy and the education profession.
Conventional wisdom among students of the curriculum is that the
major threat to freedom of the schools comes from the religious
right. While this may have been true at one time, Lerner, Nagai,
and Rothman assert that the major thrust today involves the
imposition on schools of the ideology of particular groups that
seek to use education as a mechanism for changing society. They
document the growing influence of these groups, and their
supporters among educators, through an extensive quantitative
content analysis of leading high school history texts over the past
40 years and a historical analysis of how this outlook and the
willingness to impose it became part of educators' conventional
wisdom.
The authors document the growing influence of these groups, and
their supporters among educators, in two ways. First, they present
an extensive quantitative content analysis of leading high school
history texts over the past 40 years, demonstrating in detail the
feminist and multicultural perspectives that have come to dominate
them. Second, they provide a historical analysis of how this
outlook and the willingness to impose it became part of educators'
conventional wisdom, tracing current policies back to the influence
of the Progressive education movement led by John Dewey. This
controversial book will be of exceptional interest to the general
public as well as to researchers and students of education, public
policy, and American intellectual history.
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