Many teachers are frightened of controversy because they have not
experienced it themselves in an academic setting and do not know how to
handle it. “Most social studies teachers in U.S. schools are ill prepared by
their own schooling to deal with uncertainty,” according to Shirley Engle.
“They are in over their heads the minute that pat answers no longer suffice.”
Inertia is also built into the system: many teachers teach as they were taught.
Even many college history professors who well know that history is full of
controversy and dispute become old-fashioned transmitters of knowledge in
their own classrooms.^71
Since textbooks employ a rhetoric of certainty, it is hard for teachers to
introduce either controversy or uncertainty into the classroom without
deviating from the usual standards of discourse. Teachers rarely say “I don’t
know” in class and rarely discuss how one might then find the answer. “I don’t
know” violates a norm. The teacher, like the textbook, is supposed to know.
Students, for their part, are supposed to learn what teachers and textbook
authors already know.^72
It is hard for teachers to teach open-endedly. They are afraid not to be in
control of the answer, afraid of losing their authority over the class. To avoid
exposing gaps in their knowledge, teachers allow their students to make “very
little use of the school’s extensive resources,” according to researcher Linda
McNeil, who completed three studies of high school social studies classes
between 1975 and 1981.^73 Who knows where inquiry might lead or how to
manage it? John Goodlad found that less than 1 percent of instructional time
involved class discussions requiring “reasoning or perhaps an opinion from
students.”^74 Instead of discussion and research, teachers emphasize “simplistic
teacher-controlled information.” Teachers’ “patterns of knowledge control
were, according to their own statements in taped interviews, rooted in their
desire for classroom control,” according to McNeil.^75 They end up adopting
the same omniscient tone as their textbooks. As a result, teachers present a
boring, overly ordered way of thinking, much less interesting than the way
people really think. Summarizing McNeil’s research, Albert Shanker, himself
an advocate for teachers, noted that the same teachers who are “vital, broad-
minded, and immensely knowledgeable in private conversations” nonetheless
come across as “narrow, dull, and rigid in the classroom.”^76
David Jenness has pointed out that professional historical organizations for