Lies My Teacher Told Me

(Ron) #1

argues that “affect—either positive or negative—was virtually absent” from
the classrooms he and his associates studied. Flat is the adjective he applies to
what went on.


11 Washington, D.C.: PBS Frontline video, 1985.


12 A. B. Hodgetts and Paul Gallagher, Teaching Canada for the ’80s
(Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978), 20.


13 John Ogbu, “Racial Stratification and Education,” in Gail E. Thomas, ed.,
U.S. Race Relations in the 1980s and 1990s (New York: Hemisphere, 1990),
27-30. See also Herbert Kohl, “I Won’t Learn from You!” in I Won’t Learn
from You and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment (New York: New
Press, 1994), 1-32. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Report 1:
1969-1970 Science (Washington, D.C.: NAEP, 1970), shows only small
black/nonblack differences in science. Jean Fair, ed., National Assessment
and Social Studies Evaluation (Washington, D.C.: National Council for the
Social Studies, 1975), 56, 63-64, 77-82, shows large black/nonblack
differences in social studies. Richard L. Sawyer, College Student Profiles:
Norms for the ACT Assessment, 1980-81 (Iowa City: ACT, 1980), gives
norms in four academic areas, English, math, social studies, and natural
sciences, by income, race, and so on.


14 Jeffrey Fouts, “Female Students, Women Teachers, and Perceptions of the
Social Studies Classroom,” Social Education 54 (11/1990): 418-20.


15 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “When Ethnic Studies Are Un-American,” Social
Studies Review, no. 5 (Summer 1990): 11- 13.


16 Martha Toppin, “I Know Who’s Going with Me,” Social Education 44
(10/1980): 458.


17 On Clifford, see Tom Wicker, “An Unwinnable War,” New York Times,
6/12/1991; on McNamara, see Jonathan Mirsky, “Reconsidering Vietnam,”
New York Review of Books, 10/10/1991, 44. The Gallup poll, 11/1986, found
71 percent agreement (excluding “don’t knows”) that “the Vietnam War was
more than a mistake: it was fundamentally wrong and immoral.” In August
1984, the Roper organization asked “whether what this country did was the
right thing or the wrong thing—or somewhere in between: fighting the war in
Vietnam.” Sixty-five percent said “wrong thing”; since 17 percent answered
“somewhere in between” and 5 percent didn’t know, 83 percent of persons
making a choice called it wrong. For such proportions of the U.S. public in the

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