8 Quoted in Bessie L. Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History in
the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 329-30.
9 Shirley Engle and Anna Ochoa, “A Curriculum for Democratic Citizenship,”
Social Education (11/1986): 515.
10 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 172-73.
11 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945);
James O’Brien, personal communication, 11/12/1993.
12 Teacher-training programs now often assign Lies My Teacher Told Me;
partly as a result of the ensuing discussions, American history in high schools
is beginning to be better taught.
13 Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, 225.
14 George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 35.
15 William L. Griffen and John Marciano, Teaching the Vietnam War
(Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979), 163-72.
16 These writers include Michael Apple, Stanley Aronowitz, Kathleen
Bennett, Samuel Bowles, Martin Carnoy, Herbert Gintis, Henry Giroux,
Margaret LeCompte, Caroline Persell, Joel Spring, Kathleen Weiler, and many
others.
17 Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1990 [1975]), 99.
18 The Politics of Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985),
102.
19 Henry Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 47. Like some other critical
theorists, Giroux goes on to specifically disclaim intentionality: “This is not
meant to imply a conscious conspiracy on the part of an ‘invisible’ ruling
elite.” Except for the accurate but vague claim that the upper class sets the
rhetoric of the age, which trickles down to influence how we all think about the
past, these theorists never quite specify how the upper class influences what
gets taught in a rural classroom in American history, for example. In the pages
that follow, I suggest more specific forces that may be at work.
20 David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, “Conflict and Consensus in American