about who determines the way history is written: “Who controls the present
controls the past.”^14
The symbolic representation of a society’s past is particularly important in
stratified societies. The United States is stratified, of course, by social class,
by race, and by gender. Some sociologists think that social inequality motivates
people, prompting harder work and more innovative performance. It does, but
stratificaton is also intrinsically unfair, because those with more money, status,
and influence use their advantage to get still more, for themselves and their
children. In a society marked by inequality, people who have endured less-
than-equal opportunities may become restive. Members of favored groups may
become ashamed of the unfairness, unable to defend it to the oppressed or even
to themselves. To maintain a stratified system, it is terribly important to control
how people think about that system. Marx advanced this analysis under the
rubric false consciousness. How people think about the past is an important
part of their consciousness. If members of the elite come to think that their
privilege was historically justified and earned, it will be hard to persuade
them to yield opportunity to others. If members of deprived groups come to
think that their deprivation is their own fault, then there will be no need to use
force or violence to keep them in their places.
“Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education,”
according to William L. Griffen and John Marciano, who analyzed textbook
treatment of the Vietnam War.
By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that
dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of
ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception
on such vital issues as the Vietnam War.... Within history
texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints
limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view
history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality
textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their
world that would sharpen their critical abilities.^15Here, in polite academic language, Griffen and Marciano tell us that
controlling elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to keep us
ignorant and stupid.
Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as