Institute, 2000); a study of 556 students at fifty-five elite colleges and
universities commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
summarized by the Associated Press—“Students Ignorant of History,” USA
Today, 6/29/2000; the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress in
History, summarized by Diane Ravitch, “Should We Be Alarmed by the Results
of the Latest U.S. History Test? (Yes),” History News Network,
hnn.us/articles/1526.html, 10/19/2003; Sheldon M. Stern, Effective State
Standards for U.S. History (Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Institute,
2003); and Joe Williams, “Duh! 81% of kids fail test,” New York Daily News,
nydailynews.com/front/story/308139p263646c.html, 5/10/2005. In addition to
pointing out that graduates know little history, McPike also claims they are not
nationalist enough, having been taught too many bad things about our past. I
disagree.
6 James Green, “Everyone His/Her Own Historian?” Radical Historians
Newsletter 80 (5/99): 3, reviewing and quoting Roy Rosenzweig and David
Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998).
7 Richard L. Sawyer, “College Student Profiles: Norms for the ACT
Assessment, 1980-81” (Iowa City: ACT, 1980). Sawyer finds larger
differences by race and income in social studies than in English, mathematics,
and the natural sciences.
8 Years ago Mills discerned that Americans feel a need to locate themselves in
the social structure in order to understand the forces that shape their society
and themselves. See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 3-20.
9 Paul Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook (Lexington, MA: D. C.
Heath, 1978). Goldstein says textbooks are the organizing principle for more
than 75 percent of classroom time. In history, the proportion is even higher.
10 One of the “new new” books, We Americans, also has ancient antecedents
but changed authors and was radically revised around 1990.
11 ———, “Ask an Alum,” Vermont Quarterly (Fall 2005): 53.
12 Ravitch and Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? 49.
13 Mel Gabler’s right-wing textbook critics and I concur that textbooks are
boring. Mrs. W. Kelley Haralson writes, “The censoring of emotionalism from