of the upper class. To blame the power elite for what is taught in a rural
Vermont school or an inner-city classroom is too easy. If the elite is so
dominant, why hasn’t it also censored the books and articles that expose its
influence in education? Paradoxically, critical theory cannot explain its own
popularity. Any upper class worth its salt—so dominant and so monolithic that
it determines how American history is taught in almost every American
classroom—must also have the power to marginalize those social scientists
who expose it. But the upper class has hardly kept critical theory out of
education. On the contrary, critical theorists dominate scholarship in the field.
Their books get prominently published and well reviewed; education
professors assign them to thousands of students every year.
The upper class controls publishing, to be sure, but its control does not
extend to content, at least not if the books in question make money. Robert
Heilbroner has pointed out that no matter what is done in America, members of
the upper class usually have a hand in it, but their participation does not mean
that they directed the action, nor that it was in their class’s interest.^24 Many of
the books that criticize American education are published by companies that
also put out the textbooks they criticize. One of the glories of capitalism is that
somewhere there are publishers who will publish almost any book, so long as
they stand to make a profit from it. If the upper class forces the omission of
“crucial facts and viewpoints,” then why has it failed to censor the entire
marvelous secondary literature in American history—which occasionally even
breaks into prime-time public television in series like Eyes on the Prize, an
account of the civil rights movement. The upper class seems to be falling down
on the job.
The elite has also apparently lost control of the landscape. Across America,
new, more accurate historical markers and monuments are going up. In
Alabama and Illinois, for example, new markers give tourists a good sense of
the “Trail of Tears” of the Cherokees and Choctaws. A new monument in
Duluth, Minnesota, tells of the tragic day in the nadir of race relations when
whites lynched three black circus workers. American Indians have created
new museums, such as the Pequot Museum in Connecticut that tells the full
story of the tribe, including their partial annihilation by the Pilgrims, their
survival through the nadir, and their successful new casino. The Museum of the
Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, mounted its first-ever exhibit on slavery,
which included chains, torture devices, and a resulting book that did not