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Mr... 2...'. {walk MICHIGAN STATE UNIVER Ill/Will I/U/iW/I/I/fl/l I// _3_ 93 00914 3128 WWI/ll IW/hf" ,m This is to certify that the dissertation entitled Ahistoricism and Fragmentation in United States History Textbooks of the 1980s at Elementary, Middle, and High School Levels: A Content Analysis and Study of Influences presented by Mark Robert Larsen has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph. D. degreein Education Major pro essor Date July 23, 1990 MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0 — 12771 M-.-_ —.__. " W 1 Lrnmr fireman State University “ “.1 PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution CWWms-pd AHISTORICISM AND FRAGMENTATION IN UNITED STATES HISTORY TEXTBOOKS OF THE 19808 AT ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE, AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVELS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS AND STUDY OF INFLUENCES BY Mark Robert Larsen A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Teacher Education 1990 (b4Hb-694h4f§ ABSTRACT AHISTORICISM AND FRAGMENTATION IN UNITED STATES HISTORY TEXTBOOKS OF THE 19808 AT ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE, AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVELS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS AND STUDY OF INFLUENCES BY Mark Robert Larsen This study examines fourteen 19808 United States history textbooks at elementary, middle, and high school levels for excessive ahistoricism and fragmentation. Fac- tors responsible for ahistoricism and fragmentation are investigated in a comprehensive review of the literature. These factors include the influences of other media, the history of the social studies and citizenship education, the nature of contemporary history, theories of child develop- ment, the clash between narrative and social history, his- tory writing and literary style, and elements in the history of United States education and curriculum. Although textbooks seem to contain only a small amount of ahis- toricism, their overall impression is one of superficial treatment which tends to promote presentism. Fragmentation is prevalent at all textbook levels.‘ Some types of ahistor- icism and fragmentation duplicate those found by FitzGerald in 19703' textbooks; others appear as recent developments. Copyright by MARK ROBERT LARSEN 1990 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful for guidance and support from Dr. Lois A. Bader, advisor, committee chair, and dissertation direc- tor, Michigan State University; Dr. John M. Chapman, Social Studies and International Education Specialist, Michigan Department of Education; Mrs. Mildred 8. Cloud, Teacher Emeritus, Ionia Public Schools; and Russell C. Gregory, Editor, Ionia Sentinel-Standard. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER I: THE PROBLEM . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose and Need for the Study . . Background . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent textbook controversy Fragmentation Ahistoricism . Summary . . . . . Delimitations . . . Research questions . Organization of the Study Works Cited . . . . . . . CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . History of education in the United States The influences of other media on textbooks The teaching of United States history and social studies . . . . . . . . . . . Concepts of history . . . . . . . Studies of textbooks . . . . . . . . . United States history textbooks . . . History writing and style . . . . . . Methods of textbook analysis . . . . Developmental considerations in the social studies . . . . . . . . . . . Citizenship education in the social studies Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER III: METHOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population and sample selection Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . Unit of analysis . . . . . Ahistoricism . . . . . . . iv vi vii 33 33 33 48 55 85 89 90 94 104 108 114 144 147 160 160 162 163 163 Fragmentation Hypotheses . . . Method of analyzing data . Works cited . . . CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS . . Introduction . . . Elementary textbooks Middle school textbooks High school textbooks Ahistoricism . . . Fictional representation Omission . . False emphasis . Futurism . . Conclusion . Fragmentation . . Events leading Cowboys . . Abraham Lincoln Civil rights Conclusion . Hypotheses . . . . Summary . . . . Works cited . . . CHAPTER V: SUMMARY AND Summary . . . . Conclusions . Implications . . Works cited . movement to theC DISCUSSION CIV O O O O O O O HO. O O O O O O O O O O 1 War 165 167 168 170 172 172 172 173 174 175 175 177 182 183 183 184 184 191 196 200 202 204 208 210 210 221 215 223 233 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Levels of Teacher Responsibility in Three Types of Instructional Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Economic Images of Human Nature and Society . . 166 vii CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM WW!!! In the late 19703 Frances FitzGerald found excessive fragmented and ahistorical content in that decade's United States history textbooks. This study seeks to determine whether 1980s' United States history textbooks contain excessive fragmented or ahistorical content and whether the nature of that content is different from that found by FitzGerald. Ahistorical elements derive from a viewpoint that proceeds without regard for history or historical development. An alternate definition of ahistoricism would be a vision of the past that regards it as essentially the same as the present, while history would "assert the dif- ference of the past" (Kellner 1989, 326). Fragmentation is one dimension of what Postman (1985) called disinformation, "misleading, misplaced, fragmented or superficial infor- mation--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing" (107). Fragmentation results either from an absence of themes, their dissociation into discontinuous or unrelated facts or ideas, or the superficial treatment of subjects. 2 In either case, fragmentation prevents or interferes with coherence and, therefore, comprehension and retention. Coherence "refers to the extent to which the sequence of ideas or events in a text makes sense and the extent to which the text makes the nature of events and ideas and their relationships apparent" (Beck, McKeown, Omanson, and Pople 1984). The kinds of elements FitzGerald found ahistorical varied according to period. In nineteen fifties' textbooks she found the ahistorical notions of progress and perfec- tionism; in 1970s' textbooks, an "engagement with the social sciences" (1980, 13). This latter influence she found in textbooks' organization and content and found it reflected notions of the new social studies of the 19703 that stressed the social sciences and slighted history. In FitzGerald's view this influence reflected a pedagogical psychology of "manipulativeness with regard to children" that made the textbooks "so ahistorical and so boring" (1980, 199). Textbook writing has been criticized for its fragmen- tary quality; textbooks have been described as chockfull of facts unlinked by coherent themes. FitzGerald called 19503' textbooks "encyclopedias rather than history books" (58) and likened twentieth century textbooks' view of history to what Toynbee called "the one damn thing after another” school because they were, as FitzGerald continued, 3 uncertain as to what really does make history. They have found a great variety of temporary actors-~"the North," "the Free World,” "the farmers"--but no recurrent ones and no systematic relationships (156). Implicit in FitzGerald's argument is a link between an uncertain concept of history and fragmentation. This lack of certainty about history has been attributed to the ten- dencies of contemporary history toward lack of synthesis and specialization. Fragmentation in textbooks also results from covering many facts superficially, which has been called the ”coverage" or "mentioning" problem. Still, there is no structural reason why they have to be quite as mosaic as they are. Even those advertised as "thematic” histories do not make the obvious connections between events. Politics is one thing to them, econ- omics another, culture a third. As there is no link between the end of Reconstruction in the South and the civil-rights movement of the sixties, so there is none between Watergate and Vietnam. Because the texts cannot identify the actors in history, they cannot make these connections. Events--wars, political disputes, judicial decisions--simply appear like Athena out of the head of Zeus (160-161). g The structural reason for fragmentation may have to do with the behaviorist bias of much educational psychology in the 1970s. Behavioral objectives, which broke down con- tent into observable bits, did not facilitate the transfer of knowledge. "One theory of transfer is that broad gener- alizations or ”big ideas" increase the possibility of transfer as opposed to unrelated fragments of content" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 326). Sewall (1988) thought manifold forces responsible for fragmentation: 4 Social studies methods have pushed history to the margin, favoring instead ahistorical subject matter. Textbooks have relied more and more on broken text and pictorial flash to hold students' interest. Efforts to render textbooks "readable"--at least by the standards of readability formulas-~have contributed to their arid prose. And political considerations increasingly determine the content of textbooks (554). In the ten years since the publication of America Revised, researchers have reported noninformative, frag- mented, or ahistorical elements in history textbooks (Hertz- berg 1980; Larkins, Hawkins, and Gilmore 1987; Gagnon 1988). Textbooks at various grade levels, however, have not been systematically compared for fragmentation or ahistoricism since FitzGerald's study. Neither ahistoricism nor fragmen- tation appears capable of widely-accepted definition. The presence of fragmentation or ahistoricism in a history textbook can reflect more than one influence. Since textbook publishing is a commercial venture, textbook content is seismographic of influences that guide school curric- ulum: state or local education agency curriculum guides, special interest groups, textbook adoption committees, and political climate. Curriculum guides, in turn, depend on conceptions of history, social studies, child development, and pedagogy that are not static. Identifying fragmented or ahistorical elements in textbooks can serve to suggest the concentration of textbook influences for a given period; in addition, identifying fragmentation or ahistori- cism can more easily lead teachers, curriculum workers and, 5 eventually, publishers to correction. Unless corrected, such elements may confuse, disaffect, or indoctrinate a reader. The purpose of a textbook, according to Cronbach (1955), is to ”transmit selected portions of culture to the learner,” (28) yet in that function a textbook assumes the role of a ”social institution, having a long history and complex ties with our other social institutions" (6). It is as a social institution and as literary documents that this study considers textbooks. The limitation of a study wherein textbooks are examined, as it were, in isolation is that it does not consider how they will be used in a class- room or what students will learn from them under the guid— ance of a teacher and in conjunction with other materials. This kind of study also, as pointed out by Posner (1989), examines material that students may not read. In conclu- sion, this study examines textbooks as written and not as read by a student or enhanced by a teacher. Despite multi-media instructional approaches, the textbook, often in combination with publisher curriculum "packages" of ancillary materials (workbooks, teachers' editions, ditto masters, tests), has persisted. It [the textbook] is portable, compact, and enduring. It can be read for a few minutes at a time or for many hours at a stretch. It can be studied or skimmed quickly, read once or reread often. All students can be given the same reading assignment or each can be given a different one. They can move through the material at the same pace or at very different speeds. The reader can move from the beginning of the book to 6 the end or he can jump erratically from one section to another. . . . He can use his book in class, at home, or in the library (Jackson 1969). Background The publication of FitzGerald's America Revised in 1979 effectively drew public attention to history textbooks and began an at times intense dialogue about their content. FitzGerald's book was not a scholarly work in the sense of carefully documented generalizations but rather a brilliant polemic that encouraged examination of textbooks and fomen- ted controversy in educational and publishing circles com- parable to that generated by Edmund Wilson's essay, "The Fruits of the MLA" (1968), which attacked the Modern Lan- guage Association for ineptitude, boondoggling, and a fac- tory system of editing that produced "unreadable" versions of literary texts. Although not of Wilson's literary sta- ure, FitzGerald, a journalist, struck a chord because she reminded readers of how the certain world of textbooks in their own childhoods had changed to an uncertain one in textbooks of their children. Both Wilson's and Fitz- Gerald's works were published in the popular and not in the professional press. Ward (1980) found FitzGerald's study "the closest thing we have to a study of the relation of academic history to the history in the minds of its broader clientele, the American people" (363). Textbooks, in Fitz- Gerald's view, were "consensus documents" (20), reflecting national and community opinion as "lightning rods of society” (42). Recent History Textbook Controversy The style of contemporary textbooks has been des- cribed as bland and boring (FitzGerald 1980; Sewall 1987; Cheney 1988; Gagnon 1988). FitzGerald thought blandness resulted from textbooks having been written to readability formulas because of their short, choppy sentences and a "dumbed down" vocabulary (Bell). Most readability formulas are based on measures of word and sentence length and are not designed to be applied during the process of writing, although publishers and developers have been said to do so (FitzGerald 1979, 23-24). Furthermore, readability formulas are often applied as if they alone could determine reading levels when they are only one of many factors in determining readability. Blandness also results from publishers who often assemble rather than write textbooks: not one author but several writers homogenize and rewrite until "a manufac- tured textbook language" ensues (Hertzberg 1985, 37). Pub- lishers also contract the writing of textbooks to "develop- ment houses" who write to publisher specifications (Sewall 1987; Tyson-Bernstein 1988). Cubberly (1916) likened this process to a factory tool being made "according to specifications." FitzGerald found "textbook prose" (21) and "assumption of this impersonal voice" to have first developed in the 18903 (51). 8 Blandness has also been blamed on the Ph.D. mill because few professional historians have a general audience: 'Inevitably the language of history tends to become the jar- gon of historians speaking to one another (Boorstin 1989, 21). ”It has made the scientific paper, in many ways, an art that is dead or dying" (Price 1963, 91). According to Hamerow (1988), himself a historian, what we have lost in the history adults read is the ”spontaneity and exuberance that had characterized the work of the non-academic, free lance historians. The result has been a serious diminution of the role of historical study in American life." We are all the poorer for it--which is not to deny that professionalization has made an important contri- bution to our understanding of our common past. The last 100 years have seen a more judicious investigation of historical data; myths have been demolished, distor- tions corrected, prejudices attacked. We know more precisely what happened when, where, and how. But the transformation of historical learning from a scholarly evocation to an academic discipline has exacted a price (Hamerow 1988). It may be that school history textbooks only reflect this larger loss in history itself. Despite the fact that "U.S. history seems in no danger of being displaced from the high school curriculum" (Downey 1985), whether by mandate, intention, or inertia, the more pertinent question may be, what is the nature of the history that remains? The criticisms made of history textbooks to some degree resemble criticisms of contemporary history itself. To writers such as Hamerow (1987) and Himmelfarb (1987), the 9 survival of history is threatened because two paradigms, one of narrative and the other of new social history, clash; as a consequence, historical coherence is sacrificed. The presence of ahistoricism and fragmentation may be symptoms indicating not only the degree to which assumptions about the nature of history have become disputed but also the degree to which events in their multiplicity have come to overwhelm human comprehension. In either case, the idea of a transmissible past is jeopardized. Other reasons that seek to explain the inferiority of school history textbooks include college history professors not receiving tenure credits for textbook authorship and professional history journals not regularly reviewing elementary or secondary textbooks (FitzGerald 1979; Hertzberg 1981). Textbook publishers themselves adhere to standards only for paper and binding quality and not for content, although most companies have published bias guidelines (FitzGerald 1979, 40). Des- pite the dependence on textbooks shown by many teachers, the average school district in 1986 spent $4,000 per child but only $34.17 on instructional materials (Altbach 1989). Cronbach found that although there is no "generally recognized theory about the good [text]book" (182), "texts are traditionally regarded as infallible authorities” (211). Goldstein (1978) reported that 75 percent of classroom time was spent with textbooks as was 90 percent 10 of students' time doing homework (1). Fragmentation In 1968 Richard Hofstadter wrote, "If there is a single way of characterizing what happened in our historical writing since the 1950's, it must be, I believe, the redis- covery of complexity in American history: an engaging and moving simplicity, accessible to the casual reader of his- tory, has given way to a new awareness of the multiplicity of forces” (Kammen 1980, 20). This statement only echoes Henry Adams's theme in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), since which, whether owing to a changing sense of history or to a rapidly changing world, no unity seems to have emerged. The price paid for reducing what Kammen called national chauvinism in history has been its replacement "by the high risk of subdisciplinary parochialism" and "an eclecticism that contributes to the decentralization of the discipline" (1980, 26). The form of historiography itself also has influenced what kind of history is written. Fragmentation has been attributed to the incremental nature of social history. For almost a century, the monograph was the means through which the most important additions to knowledge of the past were made. But history dif- fered from the other sciences in the absence of con- tinuities of research. The most impressive mono- graphs did not touch off chains of investigations to verify, extend, or amend the interpretations advanced; each stood a lonely Manadmock [sic], without links to any larger design--and that was true of ethnic studies as of other fields of social his- tory (Handlin 1970, 21). 11 Too, certain assumptions by New Historians of the 19403 and 19503 inhibited historical continuity. The assumptions which guided the judgment of the New Historians about the topics worthy of attention contri- buted significantly to the absence of continuity. Although history was regarded as a science, its subject matter was not autonomous but instrumental to some other purpose. Questions did not unfold from the materials of the past, they were posed either by the analytical social science or by the problems of the society in which the historian operated (Handlin 1970, 22). Thus, the subject matter of history either became fragmented or a means to ahistorical ends inherent either in the social concerns of new social history or in the methods of social science. As history has come to resemble the social sci- ences, which mirror at least the surface features of the natural sciences, it has paralleled what Price (1963) called "big science." Most practitioners of big science are "frac- tional authors" who write for "invisible colleges." "By the creation of a class of fractional authors-—that is, scien- tists who produce one nth part of a scientific paper-~a much larger number of the minimal group is kept at the lower end of the distribution" (90). The scientific paper therefore seems to arise out of the claim-staking brought on by so much overlapping endeavor. The social origin is the desire of each man to record his claim and reserve it to himself. Only incidentally does the paper serve as a carrier for information, an announcement of new knowledge promul- gated for the good of the world, a giving of free advantage to all one's competition (68). Writers of historical monographs seem to operate by similar slow accretion, as if mere accumulation of studies will 12 approach critical mass and, without intervention, lead to grand unified theories of history. But the structure of the scientific establishment they usually work to build is founded on the notion of an ultimate truth that is pieced together bit by bit, and fragment by fragment. This is to say that if one knows A and B to be true, he can safely proceed to the dis- covery of C, and be that much farther along toward having the whole jig-saw puzzle of the universe prop- erly assembled. But if he is mistaken about A or B he can scarcely hope to arrive at C. This is the frag— mental notion of truth, and science, according to this notion, progresses by a series of technical ”break- throughs” (Kelly 1977, 10). Bender (1989) described the particular nature of new social history as one whose "results are only the raw materials for synthesis" (194). Hertzberg laid blame for disjointedness in history textbooks on a lack of synthesis. The lack of available synthesis is fundamental to the poor quality of many texts. They tend to be intellec- tually thin, paying insufficient attention to long-term historical development and to the reality of conflict. Most textbooks lack incident, drama and enough concrete detail to bring the past to life (1985, 37). This lack of synthesis, according to Hertzberg, runs through contemporary historiography and derives from the history profession's tendency "to define the production of new knowledge and new interpretations based on that knowledge as the highest type of historical inquiry [which] casts synthesis in an inferior light" (1985, 28). Synthesis involving the sweep of centuries is a challenge of virtually no interest to most historians today. It has a low priority in graduate training, and almost no dissertations attempt it. Few historians as part of their recognized professional work write books that encompass what is ordinarily covered in a high school history course. There are thus few models on which to draw. Yet synthesis is exactly what we need in 13 survey courses that comprise most of the secondary school curriculum if they are to be more than an :ggumulation of unrelated events (Hertzberg 1985, 27- Hertzberg proposed synthesis itself as a new specialty, as a kind of metahistory, or critical summary of history. What such a proposal fails to consider is that the history pro- duced by multiple authorship may be different in kind from that written by the solitary historian of synthesis who was not a team player (Price 1963, 109-110). The segmented quality of monographs shows interdependence and teamwork among authors. Scientific papers are assembled by a process rather like knitting or the way in which pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are held together by interlocking with their neighbors. Each scientific paper seems to build onto about a dozen previous papers (Price 1975, 125). The pressure to include ethnic and minority groups in textbooks, when accommodated by publishers, can lead to fragmentation if treatment of groups interferes with syn— thesizing themes. This trend "will lead to a Balkanization of American history, in which every group may get a 'proper' share, but in which the central story, one in which all groups participate, is simply left aside to be assembled as well as possible by the student and teacher" (Glazer and Ueda 1983, 2). Extensive discussions of ethnic groups and their relations to the surrounding society "make the new history textbooks, in somewhat greater measure than those of the past, histories of society rather than 14 narratives of important events" (58). FitzGerald found publishers' efforts to serve diverse constituents and interest groups resulted in a content that was ”sculpted and sanded down" (47). The image management of textbooks, as Dowd (1989) said of image management in politics, has been raised to "a cynical art form." The photographs or mentions of "twofers," persons such as Senator Daniel Inouye, who is both disabled and a Japanese American, are only one example. Bender (1989) observed that ”there seems to be a conflict over whether history is about representation or about meaning" (189). And because publishers have accepted the necessity to respond to various and diverse group demands for inclu- sion, the American history narrative has been further dissolved by the practice of "mentioning" or even featuring various groups in an ad hoc manner, without integration or synthesis. The result is the fragmenta- tion of the American story. Instead of a clear notion of a national past, historians are giving us many partial pasts, the history of many groups, often in splendid isolation, with little suggestion of how or whether they make up a nation or a society beyond themselves (Bender 1989, 189). Bender doubted that returning to "the story as we once studied it in school could retain its old compelling force”; therefore, the question became "how to locate a narrative principle" (191), "some principle of unity" (192). He recommended a focus on the public realm, "where groups interact to make national politics and culture" (199). Fragmentation may not be the same thing as 15 eclecticism, which was once a favorite selling point for textbooks in the nineteenth century (Lindberg 1976, xx-xxi) Fragmented elements lack a context or connection to each other; whereas, selections from eclectic readers such as McGuffey's, illustrated pious themes. The nature of historical records themselves is fragmented; history's raw materials constitute what Michel Foucault called an "archaeology of knowledge"; by arrangement or connection of these fragments, usually into established literary forms, a historian imposes a structure. Every history a reader encounters, as it were, has been "cooked." Not all styles of historical writing presume either chronological sequence or the elements of plot and story. The third book of Michelet's History of France (1857), called the ”Tableau de la France," or picture of France, is often cited as one of the "forerunners of the Annales school's preference for nonnarrative forms" (Kellner 1989, 108). The "Tableau" is a series of vignettes in which Michelet sketches the character of each province's people and natural setting "through anecdotes and the recognition of its famous men and women. He does not, in any way, relate the history of any province, nor is there any temporal movement in his journey around his country" (Kellner 1989, 109). Similar to Michelet's ”Tableau," Fernand Braudel's History of the Mediterranean (1949) follows a circular 16 structure but one that owes more to late Roman Menippean satire as well as to ”the aesthetic modernism of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, and Mann” (Kellner 1989, 184). As Menippean satire featured an alternation of poetry and prose, so does Braudel's work alternate graphics and prose. However, as the work [Braudel's history] has reabsorbed the verse component of its genetic inheritance, it has substituted for it something else, a new non-prose. Maps, charts, tables, graphs, painting, serial and satellite images, photographs, and other non-prose signifiers populate the second edition, and their absence in the first, due to the economic strictures of the late forties, was sorely lamented by the author. That these hundred-odd eruptions create the same texture as a verse/prose pattern is in itself a minor analogy (Kellner 1989, 172). Literary development prefigures philosophical and histor- ical development. In art, fragmentation has been concom- itant with the twentieth century, as any reader of T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" or James Joyce's Finnegan's wake can attest. A certain amount of fragmentation, condemned so roundly in textbooks, may be, as it were, residual, so much twentieth century background noise. Twentieth century philosophies of language "have tended to dissolve the distinction between poetry and prose, asserting the fundamentally figured-~that is to say, poetic-~nature of all language" (Kellner 1989, 173). According to Kellner, quantification has assumed the place of prose as non-figurative language: "Quantification thus becomes the 'natural' language that prose had been, while all verbal language retreats into an accepting recognition 17 of its ultimately poetic status. . . ." (173). New social historians have relied extensively on quantification. A history as such Braudel's, ironically, may presuppose that a reader possesses a knowledge of chronological history, for the connections between and among events will be missing unless supplied by background knowledge. Ahistoricism As was seen in the case of fragmentation, certain aspects of ahistoricism may also be endemic to the twentieth century. Anachronism has been a common device in art: near the turn of the century, the young Picasso gazed at the figures on the ceiling of the caves at Altamira, so in 1939 he could draw a bull in Guernica that strongly echoed the archaic. Ahistoricism may be considered a form of bias but not in the sense of bias against a group. Some degree of bias in textbooks is unavoidable, owing to com- pression and their audience. The shorter the book, the more rigorous the selection of facts: so that, other things being equal, the shorter the book the more it is prejudiced; and schoolbooks, being necessarily the shortest of all, are often the most tendentious of all. Academic historians have always complained that school history is unreal and unschol- arly, and therefore fundamentally misleading. No doubt it is, though the charge is largely irrelevant, because school books have to be written to suit children (Dance 1960, 15). The evaluator of history textbooks must recognize "what is true in a school book may not be true in a work of historical research" (Austin 1962, 143). The unique 18 properties of textbooks thus confer immunity from certain criticisms; textbooks call for "searchlights, not X-rays" (Dance 1960, 124). The provenance of textbooks is the already known: "the school history books of any country contain the commonplaces of its historical thinking” (54). Since children must be taught in ways appropriate to their ages, which educators refer to as developmental consid- erations, sometimes adults must "avoid telling children the truth until they are old enough to grasp it--in history teaching, no less than the broader facts of life" (29). Articles on research are legion; they deal with all history from before Adam till after Hitler and no textbook writer can keep pace with a hundredth of them. For another thing most specialist research is published in journals which few textbook writers can be expected to see--and in any case many a new piece of research is followed by another, contradictory piece of research, in some equally inaccessible publication. Eventually 'the truth' gets into the major histories, and from there it reaches the school-books; by which time it is quite likely that 'the truth' has become an 'interpretation of history' which the academies have decided to discard (28). According to FitzGerald, the path of secondary level history textbook development flows from both college textbooks, which "show what is necessary in the way of scholarly furnishings," (1979, 23), as well as from analysis of competing publishers' textbooks. Textbook publishers often copy elements from other textbooks (Gould 1990, 20) and often pattern their books after market leaders. What Elson pointed out for tradebooks (non- textbooks) may be true also for textbooks. 19 In the United States the concept of the best seller creates best sellers. . . . If one buys it one joins the great majority, and need not seek the strength to defend one's individual taste, even to oneself (1985, 12). History has been called ”the most undisciplined of disciplines" (Stocking 1965, 211). It is commonly supposed that history is over and done with, and therefore unalterable. The basis of this idea is that history is the past. But history is not the past--it is the record of the past. If there is no record, there is no history; if there is a record, it has a recorder, whose views and prejudices enter into his record, and colour it. . . . In fact, there can be no such thing as objective history (Dance 1960, 9). At the least, history is capable of wide variation. Butter- field (1931) called one variation the Whig interpretation of history, which he characterized as "the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, t0‘ praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present" (Stocking 1965, 211). Whig historians succumbed to the "historian's 'pathetic fal- lacy'" by the principle of abridgment. By assuming progress in advance, they selected only those events which illustrated it. Butterfield's definition also implies, without saying so, a Tory interpretation of history. Stocking equated Butterfield's definition of the Whig interpretation of history with presentism, an outlook dom- inated by contemporary attitudes or experiences. The "sins 20 of history” incurred by presentism included: "anachronism, distortion, misinterpretation, misleading analogy, neglect of context, oversimplification of process" (215). One can add that of omission or abridgment to the list. When FitzGerald wrote of ahistoricism in history textbooks, it appeared with related words: anachronism, presentism, perfectionism, evasion. These appear as types of ahis- toricism that may owe their presence to either an ahis- torical educational philosophy or to other ahistorical approaches. For example, in the endpapers of 19703' textbooks FitzGerald found "American values" listed without any historical support. Such a list implied that American values had not changed at all in four centuries and, thus, exemplified not only "strangely arbitrary wishful thinking“ but also "anachronisms" (161-162). Such a past could be described, in the words of Oakshott (1983), as "a past divorced from evidence (for evidence is always present) and consequently nothing and unknowable" (177). FitzGerald called textbook philosophy ”a conscious creation" (167). Ahistoricism, more than violating strict chronology, can lead a reader to believe the future always improves upon the past, thereby making the past unworthy of study. In some texts FitzGerald thought the discussion questions ahistorical. Some of the new texts do not have lists but instead questions such as "What do you think about President Johnson's plan for Reconstruction? What would you have done in his shoes?" These questions derive from a 21 post-sixties admission that Americans do not think alike on every issue and that therefore the goal of a teacher can be merely to clarify students' ideas, beliefs, and prejudices. These questions are also, however, completely ahistorical. Although an aim of teaching is to provoke thinking, what students think about Johnson has little bearing on what they understand of Johnson's actions or reasons for them. Because they [contemporary textbooks] do not show historical development in American values and insti- tutions, they deny all possibility of reflection on change in the future. Neither Whig nor Tory, their approach to history is, in fact, more primitive than either philosophy would allow. Their history is a catechism, except that it deals with institutions, not individuals. In its flatness and its uncritical conformism, it is a kind of American socialist realism (162). In finding 19703' textbooks catechetical, FitzGerald sounded an historical echo: early textbooks were "based on the catechetical plan of instruction, . . . the rote method of question-and-answer teaching” (Cremin 1951, 186). FitzGerald saw underpinnings for ahistoricism in Dewey's educational philosophy: there was "something reductive about his insistence on the utility of education to the child and the relevance of it to the child's inter- ests' (174). Under the banner of child-centeredness, the National Education Association progressives between 1910 and 1930 "turned American history into civics and civics into propaganda for their version of the social good" (174). According to FitzGerald, Harold Rugg, a progressive educator who published a social studies series for elementary and 22 junior high students in the 19303, pictured history merely as the constant striving of the well-intentioned common man to achieve a perfect democ- racy. What else had happened in history the books did not say--nor did they picture the common man of the seventeen-eighties as being any different from the common man of the nineteen-thirties (175). Rugg's books presented another variety of ahisto- ricism, that of perfectionism, the belief that moral and spiritual perfection can be achieved by humans in this life (American Heritage Dictionary 1969). The nineteen fifties, FitzGerald wrote, represented "the period of "maximum ahis- toricism" of textbooks because they presented . . . American democracy as a Platonic form abstracted from history. What appeared to be a purely political matter thus had serious pedagogical consequences. The Progressive texts had at least pointed out injustices and proposed alternatives, thereby leaving the student a little room for thought and questioning. The nine- teen-fifties texts proposed a legalistic fiction that allowed for neither and that, incidentally, looked very much like the Progressive prescription for the society turned into a description of what was. The past was forgotten and the future became indistinguishable from the present. In that confusion of tenses, the United States was perfect and yet making progress all the time (177-178). In such a case, the subject matter of history, as was seen in the Handlins' argument, became a means to ahistorical ends. From a report published by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in the 19503, FitzGerald conclu- ded: "The educationists [those who set educational policy] had, in other words, managed to put the reformist curriculum of the Progressive era to work for conservative purposes; they had created a utopia of the present" (177). 23 The perfectionism of the 19503 was paralleled by presentism in the 19703 when reforms in the social studies displaced history with the social sciences. To Hertzberg (1980) the new social studies was ahistorical; in fact, she thought educational reform, as Cremin thought of reform movements in general, "typically ahistorical” (Hertzberg 1980, 480; Cremin, 1961, 8). Other observers support this view: in the 19503 a conference of historians that led to the founding of the Committee on the Role of Education, in American History concluded that an imperfect knowledge of educational history had "affected adversely the planning of curricula, the formulation of policy, and the adminis- tration of educational agencies in the present crisis of American education" (Cremin 1970, ix-x). Also responsible for presentism in the social sciences is their ”pre-paradigmatic" state (Kuhn 1962). When there is no single framework which unites all workers in a field, but rather competing points of view or competing schools, historiography simply extends the arena of the competition among them. At its most neutral, the result is the sterile tracing of theo- retical lineages which is served up in 'history of theory' courses in many behavioral science departments (Stocking 1965, 215). Because they are pre-paradigmatic, the various competing schools of the present and of the past exist in a sense contemporaneously (216). Stocking also referred to the "historically conditioned disciplinary fragmentation of the behavioral sciences" (216) and believed the orientation of professional behavioral 24 scientists more likely to be presentist than not. Furthermore, he saw presentism virtually built into the history of science and by extension, into the history of the behavioral sciences. However disillusioned we may have become with the idea of progress in other areas, however sophisticated in the newer philosophy of science, most of us take it for granted that the development of science is a cumulative ever-upward progress in rationality (213). Here Stocking confused science with technology and working science with the history of science. The history of science is the history of errors and omissions: Bohr's model of the atom was proven wrong; Newton studied alchemy more than physics. The framework of behavioral science has also been evident in social studies because of the "systematic appli- cation of behavioural psychology to various domains of edu- cational practice" (de Castell and Luke 1989, 79). For example, in the teachers' guides to the Ginn 720 reading program of the 19803 "the use of medical and managerial models encourages teachers to see themselves as 'profes- sionals', and to see literacy instruction as the efficiently managed elimination of pathology" (de Castell and Luke 1989, 82). FitzGerald characterized much of the educational thinking of the seventies as "simplistic behaviorism" (215). While the Puritans believed that children were naturally sinful and had to be educated to virtue, modern peda- gogues tend to believe that children are mentally ill. (the latest word on this subject comes from Paul Brandwein. "Above all," he has written, "a teacher heals.” And, "In the social sciences, if nowhere else, a consideration of the child's development and mental health, within the purview of the meanings of 25 civilization, is paramount") (214-215). Summarx This chapter has outlined some of the factors attributable to ahistoricism and fragmentation in 0.8. history textbooks. A lack of synthesis in the writing of history, deriving from the specialization of professional historians and their concentration on social history, has paralleled fragmentation in history textbooks. The inappro- priate application of readability formulas and the practice of covering many subjects superficially also have been blamed for fragmentation of both style and content. The influences of behavioral psychology with its emphasis on measurable effects and of the fractionalization of history into separate treatments of ethnic groups have also contributed to fragmentation. An emphasis on progress has led to ahistoricism in 0.8. history textbooks, as has the influence of ahistorical and utilitarian educational philosophies. The approach to educational reform itself in the 0.8. has traditionally been ahistorical. The pre-paradigmatic state of the social sciences and the new social studies movement of the 19703 also have been seen as responsible for ahistoricism in textbooks. 26 Delimitatiene This study will examine only textbooks most fre- quently used in Michigan public schools because the text- books can be assumed to have been selected in accordance with uniform state curriculum guidelines. Michigan's plan for social studies follows the citizenship model (Michigan State Board of Education 1987). The range of generalization, however, extends to all U.S. history textbooks distributed in this country in that the prevalent textbooks in Michigan are representative of national usage. The study will concern itself more with coverage and inter- pretation than historical accuracy. The entirety of text- books will be examined for the presences of ahistoricism and a portion of them for fragmentation. Only student ver- sions of textbooks themselves, and not ancillary materials, will be examined. The study will be primarily descriptive, although it may, from time to time, prescribe correctives to publishers, educators, and adoption committees. 8W 1. Do textbooks contain excessive ahistorical elements? 2. If ahistoricism is present, how can it be categorized? 3. How can these types of ahistoricism be characterized? 4. Do types of ahistoricism vary by grade level? 5. What influence(s) might explain the presence of ahistoricism? 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 27 What is the frequency of ahistoricism by type in textbooks? Do the types of ahistoricism in textbooks vary by grade level? Are textbooks excessively fragmented? If content is excessively fragmented, into what types can it be categorized? How can these types of fragmentation be characterized? If content is excessively fragmented, what influence(s) might explain its presence? What is the frequency of fragmentation by type in textbooks? Do the types of fragmentation in textbooks vary by grade level? Does the frequency of fragmentation in textbooks vary by grade level? Does the frequency of fragmentation in textbooks vary by historical period? Do textbooks reflect ahistorical approaches or ahistor- ical educational philosophies? Do any appearances of excessive fragmentation coincide with those of excessive ahistoricism? MW Chapter I states the problem and research questions. Chapter II reviews previous research as a framework in which 28 to view the problem. In Chapter III the research design, procedures, and measures are described. Chapter IV describes and analyzes the findings pertinent to each research ques- tion. Summary and discussion of the research problem, method, findings, and implications of findings are contained in Chapter V. WORKS CITED Adams, Henry. 1974 [1918]. The education of Henry Adams. edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Altbach, Philip G. 1989. Introduction to textbooks in society. Educational Policy 3, 2: 91-94. Austin, J. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quoted in ed. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke Language, authority and criticism: Readings on the school textbook, 250. London, New York, Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1989. Beck, I. L., M. G. McKeown, R. C. Omanson, and M. T. Pople. 1984. Improving the comprehensibility of stories: The effects of revisions that improve coherence. Reading Research Quarterly 19: 263-277. Quoted in Isabel L. Beck and Margaret G. McKeown. Toward meaningful accounts in history texts for young learners. Educa- tional Researcher 17, 6 (August-September): 32, 1989. Bell, Terrell H. Quoted in Hechinger, Fred M. 1986. About education. New York Times June 3, C8. Bender, Thomas. 1989. Public culture: Inclusion and syn- thesis in American history. In Historical literacy: The case for history in American education, ed. Paul Gagnon and The Bradley Commission on History in Schools, 188-202. New York: Macmillan. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1989. Hidden history: Ekploring our secret past. Selected and edited by Daniel J. Boorstin and Ruth F. Boorstin. New York: Vintage Books, a divi- sion of Random House, Inc. First published in 1987 by Random House, Inc. Butterfield, Herbert. 1963 [1931]. The Whig interpretation of history. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd. Quoted in George W. Stocking, Jr. On the limits of 'presentism' and 'historicism' in the historiography of the behavioral sciences. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, 3 (July): 211-212, 1965. 29 30 Cheney, Lynne V. American memory Undated [1988?]. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities. Cremin, Lawrence A. 1951. The American common school. New York: Columbia University. . 1988. American education: The metropolitan experience, 1876-1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harper and Row Publishing Co. Cronbach, Lee J. 1955. Text materials in modern education. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cubberly, E.P. 1916. Quoted in Philip G. Altbach. Introduction to textbooks in society. Educational Policy 3, 2: 91, 1989. Dance, E. H. 1960. History the betrayer: A study in bias. London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd. de Castell, Suzanne and Allan Luke. 1989. Literacy instruction: Technology and technique. In Language, authority and criticism: Readings on the school textbook, ed. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke, 77-95. London, New York, Philadelphia: Falmer Press. Downey, Matthew T., ed. 1985. History in the schools. Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies. FitzGerald, Frances. 1980. America revised: History schoolbooks in the twentieth century. New York: Vintage Books; first published Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979. Gagnon, Paul. 1988. Why study history? The Atlantic 262, 5 (November): 43-66. Glazer, Nathan and Reed Ueda. 1983. Ethnic groups in history textbooks. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center. ERIC, ED 232 941. Goldstein, Paul. 1978. Changing the American schoolbook. .Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath. Hamerow, Theodore S. 1987. Reflections on history and historians. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . 1988. The transformation of history into an academic discipline has diminished its role. Chronicle of Higher Education (July 6), A40. 31 Handlin, Oscar, and Mary F. Handlin. 1970. The new history and the ethnic factor in American life. Perspectives in American History iv: 5-24. Hertzberg, Hazel Whitman. 1980. The teaching of history. In The past before us, ed. Michael Kammen, 474-504. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. . 1981. Social studies reform: 1880-1980, 88. Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Education Consor- tium, Inc. . 1985. Are method and content enemies? In History in the schools, ed. Matthew T. Downey, 13-40. Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1987. The New History and the Old. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jackson, Philip W. 1969. Technology and the teacher. In The school and the challenge of innovation. Committee for Economic Development, 130. New York: McGraw Hill. Quoted in Daniel Tanner and Laurel N. Tanner. ' CUrriculum development: Theory into practice, 545-546. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Kammen, Michael, ed. 1980. The past before us. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kellner, Hans. 1989. Language and historical representa- tion: Getting the story crooked. Madison: The Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press. Kelly, George A. 1977. The psychology of the unknown. In New perspectives in personal construct theory, ed. D. Bannister, 1-15. London: Academic Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quoted in George W. Stocking, Jr. On the limits of 'presentism' and 'historicism' in the historiography of the behavioral sciences. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, 3 (July): 214-215, 1965. Larkins, A. Guy, Michael L. Hawkins, and Allison Gilmore. 1987. Trivial and noninformative content of elementary social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education XV, 4 (fall): 299-311. Lindberg, Stanley, W., ed. 1976. The annotated McGuffey: Selections from the McGuffey eclectic readers, 1836- 1920. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. 32 Michigan State Board of Education. 1987. E3sentia1 goals and objectives for social studies education in Michigan (K-12) . Oakshott, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in politics. London. Quoted in Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1987. The new history and the old. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Posner, George J. 1989. Making sense of diversity. JOurnal of curriculum and Supervision 4, 4 (summer): 340-361. Postman, Neil. 1986. Amusing ourselves to death. New York: Penguin Books; first published in 1985 by Viking Penguin Inc. Price, Derek J. de Solla. 1963. Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press. . 1975. Science since babylon. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sewall, Gilbert. 1987. American history textbooks. New York: Educational Excellence Network. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1965. On the limits of 'presen- tism' and 'historicism' in the historiography of the behavioral sciences. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, 3 (July): 211-218. Tyson-Bernstein, Harriet. 1988. A conspiracy of good intentions: America's textbook fiasco. Washington, D.C.: Council for Basic Education. Ward, Paul L. 1980. Review of America revised, by Frances FitzGerald. In History Theory XIX, 3: 362-370. Wilson, Edmund. 1968. The fruits of the MLA. New York: New York Review Books. CHAPTER II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Intredustien A contemporary textbook is a curious document to the middle aged reader because it is so unlike the ones of memory. A durable cover camouflages four-color illustra- tions that lend themselves to what sales representatives ingenuously call the "flip test": selection by means of thumbing pages and scanning illustrations. Incredibly, not even a textbook consultant recommends reading an entire textbook for review (Muther 1989). According to one critic (Sewall 1987), textbooks are written mainly for teachers, "the products' adult consumers" (62); more specifically, according to one textbook editor, they are "designed for the average teacher" (Caton 1989). A contemporary textbook differs from those of thirty years ago in visual sophis- tication: its printed page has become, like that of the newspaper, ”a mosaic of items“ (Williams 1975, 45). Text- book imagery serves as graphical interface for seemingly slimmer columns of print, yet Regester (1987) found no significant differences between 19503 and 19803 textbooks in amount of graphics and text. 33 34 To account for changes, one must consider more than textbooks themselves: "it should be borne in mind that the history of curriculum thought and practice cannot be separated from the general history of American education, which, in turn, cannot be divorced from the broader stream of cultural and intellectual history" (Bellack 1969, 291). Areas that deserve examination include: United States history teaching, conceptions of social studies, the purposes of history, the nature of contemporary history, theories of child development and pedagogy, textbook criticism, and media influences. W This synopsis of United States education relies on the works of Lawrence Cremin and concentrates on schooling. The first educational efforts in the American col- onies were inseparable from family and church. As schools and colleges were founded they accounted for only a part of the public's education. As in seventeenth century Tudor England, the role of the family as "systematic educator" (119) in the colonies was fundamental. Reading was commonly learned at home by individual, responsive and communal means. In petty, or dame schools, servants or poor women taught reading to children who lived in house- holds where reading was not taught. Masters were expected 35 to teach apprentices reading, writing, and religious doctrine in addition to their trades. Despite the scarcity of formal schooling, the colonists were a reading public. Some fifty per cent of books printed by the American press between 1639 and 1689 were religious in theme; the bulk of them consisted of "miscellaneous works of edification," particularly manuals of piety and civility (Cremin 1970, 40-41). Early colonial schoolbooks imported from England reflected the "leveling upward" influence of Tudor measures that standardized textbooks and systematized the curriculum (131). Among one Boston bookseller's imports, next largest to religious books were schoolbooks (Hall 1979). The horn- book, ABC, primer, and catechism were the most characteris- tic books for reading instruction; all were ”explicitly tied to the oral tradition of the liturgy" and, for the most part, taught the already familiar (Cremin 1970, 129). A hornbook or ABC "presented the alphabet, a few syllables combining a consonant with a vowel, and a prayer or grace, usually the Lord's Prayer or the Apostles' Creed" (129). A primer was the ”elementary book of religious material which usually included the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and the Decalogue." A catechism was "a series of questions and answers setting forth the funda- mentals of religious belief" (129). The New-England 36 Primer, which first appeared about 1690, included the con- tents of the traditional hornbook and primer in addition to an authorized catechism (394). Within the next century, it sold three million copies (Boorstin 1989, 4). The Bible itself was frequently used as a reading text, for the proper interpretation of Scripture was the goal of most reading instruction. The Bible was read and reread, often in groups and almost always aloud; much of it was memorized and thus passed into the oral tradition, where it influenced many who could not themselves read; and, ultimately, it provided a world view and system of values that families held in common and that communities could therefore assume as a basis of law and expectation (Cremin 1970, 131). Familiarity with the Bible's lore and language was simul- taneously both means of achieving and prerequisite to literacy. The goal of education was the cultivation of piety and civility. The strong influences of church, family, and community combined to found schools and colleges whose organization and curriculum followed that of Tudor England: petty schools for ciphering (arithmetic) and for reading and some writing in the mother tongue (173); grammar schools for reading, writing and speaking of Latin, and instruction in Greek and Hebrew (184). Grammar school enrollment generally was restricted to males. Massachusetts' school acts in 1647 founded the first public schools of the colonies (181) . The culture and education 37 of the New England town as embodied in literature constitu- ted a ”commonwealth with a paideia" (236), the ancient Greek word that connotes not only the cultivation of youth but also the ideal of culture (Jaeger 1939, 416). Emigration to a new world meant a falling away from established modes: historical continuity was broken like bread. To colonists who encountered "untrammeled wilder- ness” and Neolithic peoples, the accounts of Israelites in the desert or of Caesar in Gaul more closely matched exper- ience than stories about European progenitors. Schlesinger found: The intense historical-mindedness of the Founding Fathers did not endure. Though the first generation came to Philadelphia loaded down with historical examples and memories, its function was precisely to liberate its progeny from history. Once the Founders had done their work, history commenced on a new foundation and in American terms. ”We have it in our power," Tom Paine said in common Sense, "to begin the world all over again” (1986, 16-17). Yet colonial culture in the seventeenth century can be summed up as overwhelmingly derivative; given impetus by the empirical science of Newton and the empirical politics of Locke, it became an increasingly creative provincial one in the eighteenth century (Cremin 1970, 253-254). Acad- emies, a vernacular form of American education, emerged in the late eighteenth-century and differed widely from their Philadelphia and English models as well as among themselves (265). 38 In a sense, then, the academy became the generic--or genera1--school that brought together under its latitudinarian roof the particular combinations of studies that suited particular American communities at particular times (505). Franklin's academy devoted most of its space to "the social studies, which included modern history, geography, social history, political history, religious and moral history, and political science" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 226). The academy was open to both boys and girls and served a dual purpose by educating for the practical duties of life and by fitting students for college (225). In the face of diversity Benjamin Rush (1786) stressed the need for a common core of knowledge and values: ”Our schools of learning, by producing one general, and uniform system of education, will render the mass of people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government" (Cremin 1980, 117). Thus, education was to equip a child with the means for citizenship. Because of increasing economic growth and social mobility, education also became a vehicle for per- sonal advancement and thus became more utilitarian, secular and popularized (545). "Popularization, then, with respect to access, substance, and control, became early and deci- sively the single most characteristic commitment of American education” (561). The stirrings of revolution and "ceaseless self- 39 education" brought about the gradual secularizing of the colonists' interests, particularly their drift to history broadly conceived. Carl Becker once observed that history replaced theology at the pinnacle of eighteenth-century hierarchy of studies, and such was certainly the case in America, at least as far as the informal curriculum was concerned (470). The United States and its history became a secular faith or in the words of Tocqueville, ”a civic religion." An atmos- phere of promise beckoned the populace to build a "new Athens” and to educate themselves for citizenship. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography itself served as a textbook for Everyman's self-education. The spirit of self-improvement implicit in the manuals of civility and piety took the form of an incipient nationalism in school- books like Webster's blue-backed speller and readers like McGuffey which sold 47 million copies between 1836 and 1870 (Cremin 1980, 69). "With universal manhood suffrage came demands for courses in history, government, and constitu- tional law as 'education for citizenship'" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 215). Education thus assumed a role in defining the American people. "Indeed, in the minds of many, education became subsidiary to citizenship and dependent upon it” (7). Cremin paraphrased what Tocque- ‘ville considered the elements of successful democracy: Put otherwise, schooling bestowed literacy and thereby prepared people to read and appreciate newspapers; and schooling taught the norms of social institutions beyond the family and thereby prepared people for 40 participation in voluntary associations (211). Like the McGuffey series of readers, evangelical publications were ”also designed as systems of reading instruction” (70). From 1825 to 1830 the American Tract Society published three million tracts. "By 1865 it had circulated 20 million bound volumes, each including a dozen or more tracts, as well as some 250 million individual pamphlets" (69). Both secular and evangelical readers conveyed an identical message, though McGuffey readers mixed homilies with American history whose significance was equated with "the divine scheme for moral government" (73). The English and Latin grammar schools and academies of the colonial period persisted into the early national period, but three innovations marked American education during the nineteenth century. The first was the infant school for children between the ages of two and seven. It originated in Great Britain and was introduced to the United States in the early nineteenth century. Initially popular, the infant school lapsed and was replaced by the kindergarten in the 18503. Secondly, the high school began in Boston as an alternative to the Latin grammar school and extended to public school children what had been available in the upper reaches of the academies (390-391). Unlike the dual school systems of Europe, the American high school 41 prepared the vast majority of students for life, whether for college entrance or vocational training. High schools were comprehensive also in their admitting children of various socioeconomic classes, and ethnic and religious backgrounds, affording them a broader range of opportuni- ties for socialization and enculturation. Elementary schools remained primarily neighborhood schools and there- fore tended to perpetuate the segregation of groups. Sup- plementary schools, the third innovation, administered to ethnic minorities, the disabled, delinquent, and others with special needs. Textbooks became more numerous and came to constitute the ”system" or structure of schooling. Readers and spellers were graded in order of length, complexity and difficulty. After 1783 the character of materials in readers changed from "an overwhelming emphasis on religious prose and poetry to a more diverse fare of stories about animals, birds, and children, frequently with a message to be conveyed or a moral to be drawn" (Cremin 1980, 392). Selections of predominantly English authors came to include an increasing proportion of American ones. Illustrations came to be richer, and many readers included sections on pronunciation and elocution as evidence of the value of rhetoric. "In the 19th-century classroom, reading was :neither a private nor reflective act, but a rule-bound 42 public performance" (deCastell and Luke 1986, 94). Convinced that knowledge was immutable, educators presented authoritative texts which were to transmit the national ideology and culture. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century the number of available textbooks grew by leaps and bounds. In New York state in 1804 there was a total of 93; in 1832, 407, and during that period the number of history textbooks increased eightfold (Cremin 1951, 188-189). Books in general use in New York state in 1832 numbered about twenty; these included spellers, readers, arith- metics, grammars, geographies, and a dictionary. History and geography were regarded as primary subjects only in the northeastern states; when used at the primary level they were used "in much the same way as they had first entered in New England--as reading material, with little emphasis given to meaning" (191). William Torrey Harris (1879) placed great emphasis on textbooks; to him "the three lead- ing characteristics of modern civilization were the rail- road, the newspaper, and the common school" (Cremin 1988, 163). Harris came to believe, however, with the develop- ments of the Pulitzer and Hearst presses and their imita- tors, that the textbook should counter the newspaper influence: the textbook was "the pedagogical tool par excellence in a newspaper civilization where public opinion 43 ruled and where the entire community needed access to similar facts and arguments if harmony was to be achieved" (Cremin 1971b, 209-210). Harris (1898) maintained that textbook education began in the United States earlier and formed a more important feature in this country than elsewhere. The justification for this I find in the development of our national idea. It is founded on no new principle, but fundamentally it is the same as that agreed upon all the world over. Education should excite in the most ready way the powers of the pupil to self-acti- vity. Not what the teacher does for him, but what he is made to do for himself, is of value. Although this lies at the bottom of other national ideas, it is not so explicitly recognized as in our own. It is in an embryonic state in those; in ours it has unfolded and realized itself so that we are everywhere and always impelled by it to throw responsibility on the indi- vidual. Hence, our theory is: The sooner we can make the youth able to pursue his course of culture for himself, the sooner may we graduate him from the school (Cremin 1980, 520-521). By 1860 a majority of the states had established public school systems, and by 1850 many had adopted Horace Mann's idea of vesting political control of the schools in the people (Cremin 1951, 175). Mann was "the commanding figure of the early public school movement" and believed the common school could contribute significantly to fashioning an emerging social order (Cremin 1961, 8). unlike Mann, however, Harris (1898), who was United States 4Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, recognized limits to the school's authority. Because it was only one 44 of several formative institutions, he saw schooling as constrained by four principles: schooling must always be deemed preliminary to the larger education of life--an education continuing through adulthood; the school should teach only what the pupil is not likely to pick up from intercourse with the family circle, with his playmates, or with his fellow workmen; the school program should embrace only such matters has have a general theoretical bearing on the world in which the pupil lives; and lastly, the school must not trespass on the just domain of the Church--mora1 education, yes, religious education, categorically no (Cremin 1961, 18). Beginning in the 18903, the progressive movement in education, which was an offshoot of Progressive social and political reform, gained impetus with John Dewey as its leading spokesman. In The School and Society (1899) he recalled the school "from isolation to the center of the struggle for a better life" (Cremin 1961, 119). Like Mann, Dewey believed "that democracy would be achieved only as schooling was popularized in character as well as clien- tele" (126). He introduced the idea of thought as problem solving and considered its application to education. Later Margaret Mead (1950) illustrated Dewey's idea by describing three traditions or "images" of schooling. The one-room school had been predicated on a parent's passing on a rela- tively stable tradition to the young; the independent school or academy for children of the privileged was con- structed on the model of a grandparent transmitting an even more stable tradition to the young; the city school with 45 its masses of immigrant children depended on the model of a parent passing on a series of coping skills for a society that was changing. She found each model inadequate to a present that was changing too rapidly for any one model to succeed (Cremin 1988, 207-208). By 1900, schooling was moving to the center of Amer- ican education. Increasingly, schools were relied upon for vocational and social sorting. Intelligence testing, experimental psychology, and a general focus on measurement in applied psychology furthered the trend toward differ- entiation. Kindergarten was introduced in a public school in 1873 and rapidly established itself during the 18803 and 18903 (Cremin 1988, 547). The junior high school spread rapidly in the years following World War I until supplanted by the middle school during the 19503 and 19603 (548-549). With the advent of the metropolitan high school, curricula expanded with offerings in the arts, physical and voca- tional training, and so-called personal development sub- jects, including driver education. Other subjects were clustered: history, geography, and civics were transformed into the social studies; reading, writing, speaking, and literature became the language arts; and biology, physics, geology, and chemistry came under the umbrella of general science. By consolidation, school enrollments increased on 46 average; by 1918 every state had made school attendance compulsory. About 90 per cent of children in United States elementary and secondary schools have been enrolled in public schools during the twentieth century. The progres- sive era also was responsible for new post-secondary institutions: the normal school, the nursing school, the private business or trade or technical school and the private junior college (247). Schools tended to become more similar in the wake of national testing, teacher- training (normal schools), and foundation studies and professional associations at the national level. The federal government increasingly made its presence and influence felt. Drawing upon the social psychology of Williams James and G.H. Mead, the progressives adopted a definition of literacy that involved the "pragmatics of intersubjective communication." The progressive classroom became "a microcosm of the ideal social community, one which fostered the development of equality and social exchange rather than authority and imitation" (deCastell and Luke 1986, 97). While "classical literacy was grounded in the exemplary text, progressives focused on questions of instructional method and social use" (98). By 1940 the legacy of progressivism, according to Cuban (1984) , was mixed. Progressive teaching methods were used by a significant minority of teachers, but most 47 instruction remained traditional and teacher centered. Certain progressive techniques were adapted in a context different from what they had been intended: industrial education, for example, had been intended for all students but, in fact, was converted to vocational education for those seeking entry-level jobs (Cremin 1988, 239-240). Reading research came to rely increasingly on developments in psychology. First, there was a slow but steady shift in the emphasis of school textbooks from a traditional focus on content--on national ideology and religious morality--to an emphasis on scientific methods of literacy training (Smith 1965). Huey (1909) and Thorndike (1917) provided a scien- tific basis on which changes were proposed in textbooks and teaching methods. Thorndike (1921) and Gates (1926) used lists of commonly occurring words to study syntactical complexity, lexical density, and eye movements relative to different kinds of text and typefaces so that readers could be made more readable and, presumably, more effective (de Castell and Luke 1989, 79). With the increasing enroll- ments of the baby boom after World War II and a severe shortage of qualified teachers, packaged reading curriculum had its most significant impact in the late 19403 and early 19503, when William S. Gray and May Hill Arbuthnot's 'Dick and Jane' series--with a host of derivative competitors--was used throughout the United States, Canada and English- speaking 'colonies' like the Philippines (79). 48 The concern with managerial efficiency and quanti- tative evaluation led to the "'deconstruction' of literacy . . . into discrete and measurable subskills" (deCastell and Luke 1986, 87). The positivist tendency of educational psychology encouraged a view of literacy "as a context- neutral, content-free, skill-specific competence that can be imparted to children with almost scientific precision" (88). Thus, the classical and progressive models of literacy were replaced by a stimulus-response, technocratic one. In this literacy model, skills were the universal elements "within an attendant fabricated worldview, in which little of cultural or social significance ever occurs” (104). Although these tendencies were most pronounced in children's readers, their effect was also visible in history textbooks as FitzGerald observed. We The technologies of electronic communications have not only shrunk the world but also altered how information is received, "[f]or the 'message' of any medium or tech- nology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 1965, 8). Marshall McLuhan (1951), applying a theory of Harold A. Innis, argued that modern culture, and particularly advertising, had thrown men and women into a "collective dream" from which they could escape only by a prodigious exercise 49 of critical intelligence. Moreover, given the unpre- cedented power of the modern media of communication, the traditional classroom could contribute little toward this critical intelligence--it could never "compete with the glitter and the billion-dollar success and prestige of this commercial education. Least of all with a commercial education program which is disguised as entertainment and which by-passes the intelligence while operating directly on the will and the desires" (72). The world of print was disrupted by the advent of photog- raphy and telegraphy. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections (Postman 1986, 70). Photography further atomized and "undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself" (Postman 1986, 74). Boorstin (1962) called this explosion of mechanically reproduced imagery the "the graphic revolution." One legacy of telegraphy and photography, according to Postman, was the "pseudo-context." The structure of pseudocontexts like the crossword puzzle is to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use: ”But the use the pseudo-context provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only use left for information with no genuine con- nection to our lives. And that, of course, is to amuse" (Postman 1986, 76). 50 The invention of the telegraph "gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information," unattached ”to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action" while attached ”merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity" (65). Telegraphy made relevance irrelevant, "made public dis- course essentially incoherent,” and introduced a world of broken time and broken attention. The cinema "brought new life for audiences across the United States and in the process gave them a new way of encountering their history" (Cremin 1988, 334). Besides entertaining readers, "films patently educated” (336). In 1945 a survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated "Americans generally thought better of radio than they did of their churches and schools" (353). Just as in the nineteenth century the pedagogy of schooling had been profoundly influenced by the pedagogy of the evangelical movement, in the latter part of the twen- tieth century the pedagogy of schooling "was profoundly influenced by the pedagogy of television" (Cremin 1988, 646). A new facet of literacy, "visual literacy" was coined to describe ”the ability to View television pro- gramming discerningly, intelligently, and critically” (660). Some of television's teaching conflicted not only ‘with the teaching of the schools and colleges but also 51 "with the education derived from reality reflected upon-- and indeed with the very notion of the commitment to reflection" (Hyman and Wright 1979). Extending the ideas of McLuhan, Postman wrote that the changes wrought by television and other communication technologies were far-reaching and even affected the nature of public discourse. As the newspaper had set the public agenda for previous generations, television set it now. Television is our culture's principle mode of knowing about itself. Therefore--and this is the critical point--how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen enter- tainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typog- raphy once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other (Postman, 92). In education Postman thought the "meta-medium" of tele- vision constituted an epistemology that formerly had been dependent on "the typographic mind." He characterized print as having a "semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content” (49) wherein ”an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result” (50). Television, on the other hand, has made ”entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience"; therefore, entertainment has become ”the supra-ideology of all discourse on tele- vision” (87). =According to Robert MacNeil, a newscaster on 52 the Public Broadcasting System (1983): The idea is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required . . . to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time. MacNeil (1983) listed the assumptions for television news: "that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism." Postman found a "theory of anticommunication" embedded in television news. "It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business" (92). In the face of communications that are discontinuous, decontextualized and incoherent, even the possibility of contradiction disappears (109). Moreover, other media imitate the characteristics of television because their audience has become conditioned to it: USA deay, is modeled precisely on the format of television. It is sold on the street in receptacles that look like television sets. Its stories are uncommonly short, its design leans heavily on pictures, charts and other graphics, some of them printed in various colors (111). For print media in the age of television, "the paragraph is becoming the basic unit of news” (112). Television "favors 53 moods of conciliation” and minimizes conflict (116). Its function is "to move fragments of information, not to collect and organize them" (136); its form renders information "simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual" (141). This state of affairs, which indeed is equalled nowhere else in the world, can properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses nor their entertainers, but are those who try to entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture, or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and educational as well. The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say (Arendt 1967). Postman argued that Sesame Street's effect on education was to enshrine the expectation of entertainment. A textbook, like the computer, moves, processes, and stores information but does not necessarily put it in meaningful form. A process called the "convergence of'modes" is already blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communication, such as the post, tele- phone and telegraph, and mass communication, such as the press, radio and television. A single physical means--be it wires, cable or airwaves--may carry services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by one medium--be it broadcasting, the press or telephone--can now be provided in several ways (de Sola Pool 1989, A-4). This convergence of modes, or confusion of realms, violates the lineal tradition of print whose basis is rationality 54 (Postman 1985, 50-51). The content of language communi- cated by print is "an idea, a fact, a claim" (50); its intent is exposition (63). The "polymorphous perverse" quality of contemporary textbooks owes not a little to the legacy of mass communications (FitzGerald 1980, 16). Although Postman's book may point to television as a factor in textbook fragmentation and ahistoricism, its unrelieved assault on the medium smacks of the jeremiad. As Williams has warned, What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues - on the one hand 'sex' and 'violence', on the other hand 'political manipulation' and 'cultural degradation' - which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialised to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television's effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause (1975, 119). Boorstin (1989) argued that mass communications' habit of novelty instills an expectation of novelty. We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman. . . . Demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabri- cated to make up for the world's deficiency. This is only one example of our demand for illusions (255). Ennis new kind of novelty Boorstin called "pseudo-events" (256), made possible by reporting's "power to make exper- ience" (257). By his estimation, "In the last half century a.jlarger and larger proportion of our experience, of what 55 we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo- events" (258). Pseudo-events become a form of reverse- propaganda: "But in our society, pseudo-events make simple facts seem more subtle, more ambiguous, and more speculative than they really are. Propaganda over- simplifies experience, pseudo-events overcomplicate it" (276). Knowledge of pseudo-events becomes the test of being "informed". . . . Pseudo- events begin to provide that "common discourse" which some of my friends have hoped to find in the Great Books. Finally, pseudo-events spawn other pseudo- events in geometric progression. They dominate our consciousness simply because there are more of them, and ever more" (280). What Boorstin called pseudo-events is a form of what FitzGerald classed as trivial information in history textbooks (1979, 59). d a es 'st Wes This account of history and social studies teaching relies on studies by Hazel Hertzberg; the account of curric- ulum relies on those of Daniel and Laurel N. Tanner. The teaching of history in United States' schools, colleges and universities as a separate, major discipline did not become widespread until the 18803 (Hertzberg 1980, 474). According to Woodward (1982), who based his study on school annual reports, the history program changed from General History and Civics and sometimes English History in the 1880's and early 1890's, to one consisting of Ancient History, 56 Medieval and Modern History, U.S. History and Civics with or without English History at the turn of the century to a program consisting of World History, U.S. History, and Civics by the 1930's (16). The American Historical Association, founded in 1884, repre- sented both the professionalization of history and its establishment in school and college curricula by means of voluntary organizations, institutional mandates, and state and local regulations (475). These developments were coter- minus with large increases in school enrollments and increa- sing job opportunities for persons trained in history (477). Woodward (1982) called the previous period that of the Clas- sical high school (1880-1900) which was "characterized by one or two courses of study, an emphasis on classical languages, literature and history, and mathematics" (81). United States history became a required subject during what Woodward called the Transition (1900-1925) and Mass (1925- on) high school. Widespread enrollment in U.S. history "clearly implied the centrality of the American experience, history, and political life" (95). In fairly general terms it appears that between 1881 and 1895 more schools did not include United States History in their programs than did so. . . . Between 1896 and 1905 this situation was reversed; in 1896-1900 the history program of 99 schools did not include U.S. History whereas that of 144 did. In 1901-05, 61 schools' history programs did not include U.S. history and 218 did (Woodward 1982, 25). In addition, "one can speculate that the massive immigration that occurred during this period had an impact on the high school and made the teaching of American history and culture 57 even more important" (188). This period was one of rising nationalism; Curti (1946) characterized United States history and civics text- books of this period as anti-British, highly pro-American and susceptible to nationalistic influence. Large interest groups such as the Grand Army of the Republic (Union vet- erans of the Civil War), ”took pains to see that textbook writers presented what to them was a true, national, and patriotic view of the Civil War" (190). However, the new emphasis on objective history in college instruction and its application to the schools "gave substance to the growing optimism on the part of the critics of militaristic, inte- gral nationalism" (215). According to Curti, John Dewey gave systematic philosophical expression to such criticism, for "the more exclusive types of nationalism and patriotism were no longer adequate instruments to test plans for the solution of pressing problems" (217). In the late 18003 and early 19003 various national committees were formed to set objectives for teaching his- tory in the schools. Some of these members--James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard--were proponents of what Edward Eggleston had called New History, a history not about the United States but about its people (Handlin 1970, 5). The intellectual foundations of history in the schools can be traced to the reports of three committees in 1893, 1899, and 1916, each of which supported textbooks in teaching history 58 (Hertzberg 1985, 34). The first of these reports came out of a comprehen- sive effort of the National Education Association (NEA) to recommend secondary and elementary currricula. In 1887 it appointed three committees: the Committee of Ten on Secon- dary School Studies, the Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education, and the Committee on College Entrance Require- ments. In 1893 the secondary school report was published; in 1895, the elementary school report. In its report on secondary schools the Committee of Ten, headed by President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, stated that the primary purpose of high school was to provide a sound education to students whose formal education would end at graduation. The Committee was divided into nine subcom- mittees of ten members each. The History Ten was chaired by Charles Kendall Adams and included Albert Bushnell Hart and James Harvey Robinson, all historians of note. Several of the members had served the schools as teachers, superin- tendents, or board members. The purpose of history and its allied subjects was not imparting facts but the training of the judgment, in selecting the grounds of an opinion, in accumulating materials for an opinion, in putting things together, in generalizing upon facts, in estimating character, in applying the lessons of his- tory to current events, and in accustoming children to state their conclusions in their own words (Hertzberg 1988, 16). For high schools was recommended French, English, and American history, and in the senior year, civil government 59 and a special period "studied in an intensive manner" in which primary sources would be consulted (10). General history was not recommended because it consisted of "a mass of details" (10). The Committee's report addressed both methods and materials of instruction, as well as the educa- tion of teachers. Provision was made for the incorporation of economics, sociology and political science into history. Although the overall Committee of Ten report aroused contro- versy, the History Ten's report did not. As might be expected of reforms coming from the top, the Committee of Ten suggested that its nine recommended subjects be taught earlier (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 233). Although it stated the purpose of secondary schools was not to prepare boys and girls for college, it discussed only those subjects required for college entrance. "Clearly the Committee considered preparation for college to be the best preparation for practical life activities" (235). In spite of the profound influence of the ideas of Pestalozzi, Froe- bel, and Herbart on educational thinking, the committee reports were based on the theory of mental discipline (238). Cubberly assessed the committees' work: "the committees were dominated by subject-matter specialists, possessed of a profound faith in mental discipline. No study of pupil abilities, social needs, interest, capacities, or differ- ential training found a place in their deliberations" (1947, 543). As yet no theoretical basis existed for 6O curriculum development in the high school, other than that of equalizing opportunity. Although the committees were guided by the principles of scholarship and preparing for life activities, a third curriculum principle was only beginning to take hold, that of student growth and develop- ment. William Torrey Harris authored most of the Committee of Fifteen's report. For the last four years of elementary school the Committee recommended two years of biography and mythology, followed by a year of American history and gov- ernment, and a year of Greek and Roman history. This change foreshadowed the three-year junior high school (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 270). Harris ignored the concern for correla- tion of subjects, as advocated by Herbart and Colonel Francis W. Parker who espoused the theory of "concentration" or synthesis of subjects; instead, the isolation of subjects was preserved. Change was nevertheless imminent. Lester Ward's Dynamic Sociology (1883) had introduced the idea that the people had to control the forces that shaped their wel- fare and not rely on laissez faire as a social system. Ward's idea gave new prominence to the social sciences in the curriculum (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 264). Ward's work and Parker's idea that each member of society contributes to the good of all helped lay the foundations for Progressivism (265-266). In 1896 the NEA asked the American Historical 61 Association (AHA) to recommend college entrance require- ments. The AHA appointed a Committee of Seven who went beyond its assigned task by also recommending the socio- civic portion of secondary curriculum. The Committee included several notable historians and others who had served as school leaders. It surveyed both American and European school systems and met with teachers and teacher associations. Like the Committee of Ten, it believed secon- dary school history appropriate for "preparing boys and girls for the duties of daily life and intelligent citizenship" (Hertzberg 1981, 13). The Committee of Seven proposed ancient history in the first year, European history in the second, English history in the third, and American history and civil government in the senior year. It argued for a historical and contextual approach to economics and government, and also recommended methods. Although not radically departing from the Committee of Ten's recommendations, the Committee of Seven ”adjusted the Ten's recommended curriculum to bring it closer to school practices and to broaden it and make it more clearly developmental" (Hertzberg 1981, 15). Despite the Committee's recommending "source study" or use of pri- mary sources in teaching history, it emphasized training in the art of "thinking historically" and not in historical investigation. This report enjoyed widespread adoption. Since the Committee of Seven did not recommend an 62 elementary curriculum, another committee was appointed which issued a report in 1909. It established a new course in Old World or European backgrounds of American history in grade 6. For the other grades, the committee recommended Indian life, historical aspects of Thanksgiving, the story of Washington, and local events for grades 1 and 2; heroes of other times, Columbus, the Indians, and historical aspects of July 4th for grade 3; a biographical approach to American history in grades 4 and 5; and a chronological approach in grades 7 and 8. The committee also suggested a parallel program in ele- mentary civics, which emphasized state and national governments, in grades 7 and 8 (Hertzberg 1981, 16). Professional societies continued to form. The Amer- ican Economic Association was founded in 1885; the American Psychological Association in 1903; the American Anthropo- logical Association in 1904; what became the American Soci- ological Association in 1907. Regional associations inclu- ded the New England History Teachers Association (1897), the North Central History Teachers Association (1899), and the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland (1904). The North Central Association became part of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1911 and eventually became the-Organization of American Historians. Interest in and commitment to history in the schools was still very much a part of the role of university and college historians, for research and teaching were less separate. Teaching associations were active and published magazines, syllabi, bibliographies, source books, teaching manuals, and other materials for the history courses recommended by the Committee of Seven and for economics and govern- ment or civics. Many of the textbooks of the period were written by association leaders. The associations also investigated and made recommendations on 63 textbooks, college entrance requirements, and courses of study (Hertzberg 1981, 19-20). The third committee, formed in 1913, was the NEA Com- mittee on the Social Studies in the Secondary Schools and had an impact such that "most of the important and influ- ential movements in the field since 1918 have simply been footnotes to the classic itself" (Cremin 1955). Its report was five years in the making, and a substantial portion remains in effect today. The Committee had sixteen members, including James Harvey Robinson, but fewer university and college members than previous committees. The Committee defined the social studies as "those whose subject matter relates directly to the organization and development of human society, and to man as a member of social groups." Its purpose was the "cultivation of good citizenship" (Hertzberg 1981, 26). The words social studies were to signify both the period's thrust toward social reform and its view that history should speak to the present. Hertz- berg (1981) found the words imbued with "the desire to include the social sciences and social issues" and to project "a distinct air of social betterment" (1). Although the social studies has been and continues to be charac- terized by multiple definitions, this study refers to it as "that portion of the school curriculum typically taken up by history or social science courses but intended as general education" (Shaver and Berlak 1968, 8). 64 The Committee recommended a six-year course: grades seven through nine were to receive geography, European and American history, and civics; grades ten through twelve, European and American history, and Problems of Democracy. The Problems of Democracy course would look at actual problems, issues, or conditions of "vital importance to society and of immediate interest to the pupil" and could involve elements of the social sciences (Hertzberg 1981, 28). Ancient history was discontinued. The influences of both the new social history of Robinson and the pedagogy of Dewey were apparent; the selection of a topic and the attention devoted to it should depend not upon its relative proximity in time, nor yet its relative present importance from the adult or socio- logical point of view, but also and chiefly upon the degree to which such topic can be related to the present life interests of the pupil, or can be used by him in his present processes of growth (Hertzberg 1981, 27). Dewey's Democracy and Education had been published in 1916. Its theme and the report's theme were identical: democratic education "should develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever nobler ends" (Commission 1918). The provisions of the 1918 Report maintained the tradition of citizenship education begun by the Committee of Ten in 1893 and the Committee of Seven in 1896 but somewhat reduced attention to the subjects in the interest of "social 65 efficiency." Woodward (1982) summarized the role of history during this period. As more students enrolled in high school the function of the high school became ambiguous; on the one hand it was to prepare students for college and on the other it was to prepare students for jobs. History provided a common experience for these two types of students; until the mid-1920's Ancient History and English played important roles in passing on perceptions of governance and polit- ical heritage. However, with the mass high school, when the intent of the high school became clearly one of edu- cating all children to 'American' values, U.S. History became the dominant history subject in schools (10). In the 19203 the loose-constructionist version of cit- izenship education was challenged by reformers. The National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS), founded in 1921, represented the diverse interests of the social sci- ences and defined social studies as a federation, not a fusion of subjects. During the 19203 and 19303, the influ- ence of university and college historians continued but on a diminished scale. Both the NCSS and AHA commissioned surveys that revealed innovations which interpreted the social studies variously. Some practitioners in the field had failed to consult subject matter specialists; others had proceeded as if the social studies were one subject. "Pub- lic schools, even the most progressive, tended to seek cur- riculum adaptation rather than reconstruction, leaving the curriculum in some kind of subject organization" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 346). Mechanistic curriculum making, "a fac- tory method superimposed on the school" such as that of Franklin Bobbitt or W. W. Charters, resulted in a 66 traditional, static subject-matter curriculum (347). Civics, the only course specifically designed for schools, became separate from history and a part of most school systems by 1920 (265). The activity movement, whose roots went back to the Dewey School before the turn of the century and in the Parker School of 1901, had an important and lasting effect on elementary curriculum. Content "was integrated around problems or units of experience. The idea that the solution of a problem requires using material from several subject fields was inherent in the activity movement" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 301). Harold Rugg developed social studies materials at the junior high school level in the 19203 that integrated study of social, political, and economic insti- tutions by focusing on social problems. In 1929 work began on a five-year study for the AHA on history teaching in the schools, which produced seventeen volumes published between 1932 and 1942. Although A. C. Krey served as chairman, the contributions of one member, Charles A. Beard, the historian, were so extensive that they prompted references to the Krey commission as the "Beard commission." George S. Counts was the commissions's research director. Unlike the three previous commissions, university scholars were heavily represented. In addition to the reports of the commission itself, individual authors' works, including Merle Curti's The Social Ideas of American 67 Educators (1935) and Counts's Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (1932), were published. A Commission volume edited by Beard stated that the purpose of the social studies was to produce "rich and many- sided personalities" (Hertzberg 1981, 45). According to Hertzberg, the Commission "rejected the idea of a general social science and of a curriculum detached from the tradi- tional social sciences disciplines" (45); however, the scope and sequence of courses was not made explicit, reflecting most of the authors' remoteness from the classroom. The conditions of the Depression were echoed in its "ten-point platform that was essentially a program for what came to be called a welfare state," yet the report insistently rejected indoctrination (Hertzberg 1981, 46). Counts's commission volume also advocated "democratic collectivism," a form of social control which amounted to indoctrination, while Bessie L. Pierce (1933) found no consensus among civic groups about what should constitute school citizenship instruction (48). Beard's and Counts's summary volume (1934) of the com- mission described the time as "a new age of collectivism" (50), which confirmed a "decided shift toward a social reconstructionist view" (Hertzberg 1981, 50). Four members refused to sign the report. Boyd H. Bode (1934) located its basic defect: it attempts to combine an authoritarian 'frame of reference' with its cultivation of effective and 68 independent thinking. The result of this misguided attempt is that the recommendations which are made are comparatively innocuous. Yet to its credit, the Commission stated the pedagogical goal was participation in a developing society--"partici- pation with intent to control" (Marshall and Goetz 1936). Not only were students to understand their society but also to be capable of molding it (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 435). The Depression took its toll on NCSS membership during the 19303, yet the AHA maintained its subsidy to Social Education which, under a different title, had been an AHA publication. A series of yearbooks began under Pierce in 1931. In the 1934 yearbook Howard E. Wilson identified the tendency for "subject matter boundaries to become less dis- tinct as the curriculum incorporated a much wider range of materials from the social sciences" (Hertzberg 1981, 55). Attention was drawn to an active, participatory citizenship education during the 1930s. During the 19303, attacks on Harold Rugg's popular social studies textbook series led to their failing to be adopted. "By the mid-1930's the idea of developing a cur- riculum for social reconstruction no longer held center stage" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 394). In 1941 Professor Ralph W. Robey of Columbia University generated contro- versy by charging that textbooks "criticized our form of government, held the private-enterprise system in contempt, and were poorly written by persons not real authorities in 69 their fields" (Hertzberg 1981, 66). The National Asso- ciation of Manufacturers, which had commissioned the study that was the basis for Robey's remarks, disavowed his con- clusions in a letter to educators. As a consequence of the uproar, the NCSS and NEA published a manual on the tactics of pressure groups. United States history textbooks in the 19303 "dealt sternly with the assaults on civil liberties during the Great War" (66). Propaganda analysis was intro- duced by means of the 1937 NCSS yearbook. In 1940 a report of the Educational Policies Commis- sion, a collaboration between the NEA and American Associa- tion of School Administrators, supported a "core" curriculum or fusion between subjects, such as one between social studies and English (57). The authors agreed that the last three years of high school generally corresponded with the AHA/NEA consensus, but they could not agree on the curric- ulum of the lower grades. The most intensive debate on social studies during the war centered on historian Allan Nevins' charges that American history was neglected in schools and colleges because social studies had watered down the curriculum. A New York Times survey shortly thereafter showed that 82 percent of colleges and universities did not require American history for graduation and 72 percent did not require it for admission. The Times (1942) next published the results of a test that showed college students' ignorance of American history facts. 70 Edgar Wesley (1943), a past president of NCSS, res- ponding to Nevins and the Times survey, pointed out in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review that the absence of a standardized terminology meant that many courses labeled social studies were in fact American history courses. Although Wesley believed that enrollment in history proper had declined, he argued that history in the schools was not in trouble because American history had maintained its status and because historical methods and approaches were common in other social studies subjects. To Hertzberg the controversy demonstrated "how wide a gulf had opened between the historical profession and the social studies and how deep was the alarm of many leaders of public opinion over the supposed failures of history teaching and the alleged disappearance of history into the social studies" (1981, 69). A report issued by AHA/MVHS/NCSS in 1944 lent support to Wesley's position. After administering its own test and surveying history programs, the group found that "enrollment in American history courses was almost universal in elemen- tary and junior high schools and so high in the senior high school as to require no program change, but that the percen- tage of college students studying American history was small and should be increased" (Hertzberg 1981, 70). The report proposed introducing major themes to facilitate the problem of articulation among the various grades. 71 Compared to the high degree of interest and response of professional societies to the social studies during World War I, those of historians during World War II were dimin- ished. ”The other professional social sciences associations took a renewed but essentially peripheral interest" (Hertz- berg 1981, 72). The 1944 and 1945 NCSS yearbooks stressed two themes: "international organization and planning for peace" and "intercultural" citizenship education. After race riots in Detroit, manifestations of anti-Semitism, attacks on Mexican-Americans, and the internment of Japa- nese-Americans, racial and ethnic discrimination became the organizing theme. Three interpretations of democratic p1uralism--the melting pot, cultural pluralism, and cultural democracy-- were introduced, and the yearbook endorsed the latter. During the 19203 Horace Kallen had coined the term "cultural pluralism" which came into use during the 19303 in reaction ’to Nazi master race theories. Cultural democracy was essentially the melting pot idea "shorn of its alleged stan- dardization and deprecations" (Hertzberg 1981, 75). Two citizenship education programs began after World War II that elicited student participation. One began in Detroit in 1945 in the aftermath of the 1943 riots. Its assessment determined "the emotional adjustment of pupils is the most important factor in the quality of citizenship for boys and girls” and found the knowledge component of existing social 72 studies courses adequate, but it was "the participatory aspects, critical thinking, and developing concern for others that needed strengthening" (77). The other project began at Columbia University with a Carnegie grant "to help students become active, responsible citizens through actual, practical citizenship participa- tion--Deweyan learning-by-doing" (78). The project was based on a book and on "Brown Boxes" that contained the practical activities. The core curriculum, with roots in the fusionist efforts of the 19203, continued to develop, most commonly with the disciplines organized around a single theme or problem. The other type was the "experience- centered core" which had clear ties to progressivism. During the 19503 the core curriculum effort came to be called block time. In the 19403 and 19503 two shifts in social studies reform efforts were apparent. First, the AHA Commission on the Social Studies declared that responsibility for scope and sequence belonged to the local education agency; second, references to the historical development of the social studies became less frequent. Other developments of the 19503 were significant for the social studies. Increasing attention was paid to the social sciences, especially the behavioral sciences. Several times more social science majors than history majors received college and university degrees. Psychology became the basic educational science, 73 resulting in more attention being paid to learning theories than to curriculum content (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 430). In the universities the rise of consensus history muffled the conflicts and reform efforts that had been important to progressive historians; hence, American history lost its appeal for the young who could no longer find "in the past of their own country the roots or counterparts of their own struggles and rebellions" (Hertzberg 1981, 88). Lastly, an emphasis on immigration history and, in higher education, the growth of area studies, especially of the non-Western world, added pressures for the revision of content. By 1950, despite favorable research findings, few schools continued to experiment with the core curriculum. In the 19503 critics such as Arthur Bestor and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover charged that the comprehensive school failed to prepare students in academic disciplines (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 578-579). Bestor (1953, 1955) argued that history should replace social studies and accused the social studies of promoting an "extravagant contemporaneity." Although influential, Bestor's study also ignored school practice, and Hertzberg found Bestor's own arguments were based on the ahistorical perspective he condemned. In 1956 he helped found the Council of Basic Education which aims to strengthen the academic curriculum. Widespread criticism, disciplinarity, and McCarthyism put an end to teaching social problem solving (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 402). 74 The 1958 NCSS yearbook was devoted to the social sciences but explored educational implications only for history and anthropology. The 1961 volume concentrated on history. In 1963 both NCSS and the American Council of Learned Societies issued a volume which set forth what a high school graduate should know about social studies sub- jects. Although its afterward set forth "the development of desirable socio-civic behavior" as the aim of the social studies, no contributor seemed to have been aware of historical precedent except for a few allusions to the "outdated" 1916 report (Hertzberg 1981, 96). In 1961 Charles R. Keller, a former professor of history, called for a "revolution" in the social sciences commensurate to that occurring in mathematics and science. The learned societies abstained from Keller's proposal, leaving the revolution to a new breed of academic entrepreneurs. Reformers in the 19603 were strongly influ- enced by Jerome Bruner's The Process of Education, the manifesto published after the Woods Hole Conference of 1958 (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 523). The National Science Foundation (NSF) had supported inservice training for teachers in mathematics and science until the launching of Sputnik in 1957 stimulated massive federal funding into NSF curriculum projects. To balance the concentration of resources devoted to mathematics and the sciences, the United States Office of Education (USOE) introduced Project 75 English and Project Social Studies. By 1962 the NSF curriculum projects, usually university-based and, in some cases, also foundation-funded, had begun, mainly in the "newer" social sciences. Among the social studies projects were an analysis of public issues, an American history program for high school, history for able students, econom- ics for elementary students, and geography, anthropology, and sociology programs. In 1963 the president of NCSS, Samuel P. McCutcheon, warned that the addition of new disciplines would lead to further incoherence in the curriculum because the social studies had "failed to develop coherence largely because teachers had followed the 1916 NEA report pattern of separate content organization (Hertzberg 1981, 103). He proposed that social studies become a discipline in its own right and base itself on a problem-solving approach. Among social studies leaders of the period, discovery or inquiry approaches seemed the only common element, yet each leader intrepreted inquiry differently. Inquiry had come to be associated "with theoretical constructs in science or mathe- matics rather than social problem solving" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 413). Discovery learning was a "disciplinary effort to teach children to think like scientists instead of children" (403). The curriculum was adapted to these materials and methods only by a piecemeal approach and never underwent any "coherent reconstruction," remaining 76 ”vulnerable to succeeding fads and fashions" (412-413). By 1965 the USOE had set up twelve university curriculum centers that dealt with social studies or its parent disciplines, including the Man: A Course of Study project, all under the organization of the newly formed Social Science Education consortium. These efforts were named the new social studies and were characterized by identification of the individual disciplines and/or basic social science concepts, discovery or inductive teaching and learning, use of the modes of inquiry of historians and social scientists, an attempt to build in cumulative, sequential learning, the notion that any idea can be taught successfully in some form to any child at any age, the challenge to the older subjects (history, geography and civics) by the social sciences, the proliferation of an explosive variety of new audio- visual materials, and teacher involvement, largely through field testing in experimental classes (Hertzberg 1981, 108-109). Generally, like most NSF curriculum efforts, the projects in the social studies were designed for the above- average student and downplayed or omitted citizenship education, affective learning, social problems, and the relationships among the social sciences (109). They reflected more the national mission for scientific advance- ment than citizenship education. When it came to implemen- tation of these projects, based upon examination of school system curriculum guides, their influence was detectable but "certainly not all pervasive" (Hertzberg 1981, 111). The curriculum materials made heavy demands on the teacher, des- pite many having been designed as "teacher-proof materials" 77 (113). The approach lent itself to the social sciences but not to history and civics which have no agreed upon struc- ture. Even so, the treatment of the disciplines by the NSF projects conferred a "static quality,” as if the disciplines themselves were unchanging. Hertzberg listed seven themes characteristic of the reforms: a decrease in history and increase in the social sciences, a focus on concepts and generalizations, a concen- tration on methods and processes, a use of ”post-holing" (in-depth study of a topic during a survey course) or case studies, the need to incorporate new knowledge or methods, an emphasis on values, and a rejection of the 1916 NEA curriculum. Reform adherents composed "a strange and fragile consensus” (115). By 1967 the new social studies had won a central place in reform efforts but public attitudes, teacher competence, and availability of materials inhibited adoption. The reformers had been oblivious to the social upheavals of the sixties; furthermore, their approach had been ahistorical. They had neither considered previous social studies reforms, nor had they investigated school practice. Activism came to be seen as "the approach to alleviating peoples' problems in the larger society" while "inquiry under the disciplinary principle became linked with the production of theoretical knowledge rather than social problem solving" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 413). The demands for equity in society and 78 for relevance in the schools did not square with the refor- mers' stress on academic disciplines. Not only did their development of materials proceed without a needs assessment but also was programmatically ahistorical; it was a "lami- nated curriculum" (428). Nearly all of them, even Bruner, lacked philosophical training. Not only did they fail to develop any orig- inal ideas about the structure of knowledge but they actually confused the social sciences with science (FitzGerald 1980, 185). Once the pendulum swung to relevance and self-realiza- tion, the massive federal funding expired. Various issues- oriented programs,each propelled by "special-interest poli- tics"--urbanization; environmentalism; local, community, family, Black, ethnic and oral history; women's, area, and population studies; futurism; consumer, global, career, political, and energy education--further complicated curric- ulum decisions. A new role for students emerged, that of social activist instead of academic inquirer (Hertzberg 1981, 122). Various ethnic groups and minorities advocated the study of their own history and culture for the social studies. Law-related education came to supplement citizen- ship education. Literature on political socialization suggested that schools' civic education programs affected the political attitudes, values, and beliefs only of black and not of white students. Procedurally, attention centered on behavioral objectives, games and simulations, individu- alized instruction, decision making, values, and student and 79 teacher choices (130). Some of these methods were directly antithetical to inquiry. Values education programs, such as Lawrence Kohlberg's moral dilemmas and Sidney Simon's values clarification, aroused controversy because the former “looked suspiciously like indoctrination disguised as freedom of choice" (131) while the latter featured the theme of "self-gratification" (Bennett and Delattre 1978). Eventually both strains of reform, the new social studies and the newer, social problems]self-realization approach reached an "uneasy detente," yet neither developed a scope and sequence (131). The 1971 NCSS guidelines referred to social problems as "the main concern of the social studies curriculum," yet how they were to be inte- grated into the disciplines remained problematic (132). Almost simultaneous with the Vietnam Conflict, the word nation came to be "studiously avoided" (133). In what Hertzberg called "a stunning example of acute presentism," the NCSS guidelines announced, "Intellectual skills, usually called thinking, have received widespread attention in the social studies only recently" (134). The do-it-yourself agenda reappeared: the guidelines called for building the curriculum on "structural elements" which were defined as "the students' own organization of their learning experi- ence" (134). Perhaps the only saving grace to the intel- lectually embarrassing 1971 guidelines was that there "is little evidence that they were actually used on any 80 substantial scale" (136). In summarizing the seventies, Hertzberg referred to social studies reform's "kaleidoscopic quality" and “widespread mindlessness" (139). The approach and litera- ture of the new social studies were "inherently fragmen- ting," (138) and "the social problems/self-realization approaches, with their concern for specific topics, were even more fragmenting" (139). The back-to-basics movement declared the social studies superfluous, and neither type of reformer effectively refuted the criticism. With the exception of a substantial exchange about values education, debate among social studies professionals was almost non- existent during the period. By 1975 social studies curriculum had come full circle. The NCSS Board of Directors stated citizenship education was the main focus of the social studies. In 1977 James P. Shaver dismissed the decade of experimentation as a fad. For many years . . . social studies personnel were too busy with teaching "academic" content to pay much attention to values and valuing as part of citizenship education. In fact, the "structure of the discipline" approach that dominated most of the curriculum develop- ment projects which masqueraded as social studies proj- ects in the 19603 was a fad that exemplified our long standing and unthinking subservience to professors in the academic disciplines (1977, 305). History itself was fragmented by New Left, revisionist, and Marxist interpretations in the sixties and seventies. The fragmentation of both history and social studies reform 81 spawned minicourses in the "shopping mall high school" (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985). In 1979 the NCSS guidelines no longer stated that social problems were the major concern; rather, it was that the social studies in the schools, according to Hertzberg, were in trouble (153). Richard S. Kirkendall, executive secretary of the OAH reported in 1975 that a survey in schools and colleges showed a crisis in history teaching. A major factor appeared to have been the dropping of requirements. Richard E. Gross published a survey in 1977 which showed social studies enrollments had decreased severely in the primary grades and had not kept pace with enrollment increases at the secondary level. Although United States history and government maintained enrollment between 1961 and 1973, world history enrollment declined. Problems of Democracy and civics enrollments fell dras- tically. The number of high schools (grades 9-12) offering United States history dropped from 73 percent in 1961 to 53.3 percent in 1973; those offering world history dropped from 68.6 percent to 49.5 percent. Only 32 percent of junior high schools (grades 7-8) featured United States history. The proportion of social science enrollments in economics, sociology, and psychology increased considerably, though they involved relatively few students. A study commissioned by the NSF was interpreted for NCSS by Shaver, Davis and Helburn in 1979. Unlike Gross's 82 report, it dealt primarily with teachers and classrooms. It included three components: a national survey of teachers and administrators, a review of the 1955-1975 research literature, and ethnographic case studies conducted during the 1975-1976 school year. It did not report the curriculum fragmentation and incoherence found by Gross, perhaps because it dealt with a different aspect of teaching and was conducted after the list of minicourses had shrunk. The NSF case studies of eleven high schools and their feeder schools were balanced for location, community size, and type as well as for population class, race, and income types. Despite the "highly episodic" nature of the case studies, most investigators reported frequent expressions of student apathy or even hostility (160). Among teachers for grades 10-12, 57 percent believed social studies less important than other subjects; for teachers of grades 7-9, the figure was 44 percent. Articulation across levels was also viewed as a "somewhat serious“ problem by 49 percent for teachers of grades 10-12 and by 37 percent for teachers of grades 7-9. The senior high schools required one or two years of social studies, commonly world or United States history. Elective courses also were available. The junior high schools typically required a social studies course each year, usually world or regional geography, United States history, civics, or state history. Contrary to Gross's study, the NCSS interpretation 83 found a dominant stability in modes of instruction and a "national sameness" in curriculum (159). The teacher was found to be the key to what social studies would be for any student. The major goal of teachers was the socialization of students. The major tool of instruction was the textbook, and longtime bestsellers dominated the market. Recitation-and-lecture, based for the most part on the textbook, was the most prevalent method of instruction, though materials from at least one of the new social studies programs were used in at most 10-25 percent of the classrooms. Teachers thought these materials most appropriate for exceptional situations and students. Teachers had not received training in inquiry methods and felt traditional methods better served classroom manage- ment. Little interdisciplinary teaching, attention to soci- etal issues, or community participation was observed. The knowledge expected of students was information-oriented; affective objectives were rarely explicit. Teachers relied mostly on external motivation for students, believing student interest in the subject was insufficient motivation (Shaver, Davis, and Helburn 1979, 151). Teachers reported considerable classroom freedom and, since they tended to agree with community views, said they did not compromise their integrity by avoiding controversial topics (Hertzberg 1981, 162). "Mindlessness" marred reforms in the sixties and 84 seventies; curriculum leaders refused to consider classroom realities and historical precedent (Shaver 1979, 44). Hertzberg faulted the country's own sense of history, attributing its case of historical amnesia to its intense focus on the present, to the rise of youth culture, to the retreat of historians from school concerns, and to the impact of the ahistorical social sciences (1981, 169). She saw a need for historical investigations into social studies curriculum and instruction that dealt with matters other than those of reform. Also needed were comparative studies of social studies programs in other countries. The pattern of American adolescence, she thought, held implications for teaching history, especially given the United States' revo- lutionary heritage. Fragmentation and incoherence were poor guides for students who "are both resisting and trying to establish new connections and relations with the world" (175). She argued for a federation of the social studies disciplines organized around citizenship education, but to do so, three issues had to be resolved: the nature of the disciplines, the nature of their relationship, and the problem of synthesis. Hertzberg saw no alternative to history and civics/government as the spine of the curric- ulum, given the "synthesizing and integrating power of history" (180). Social studies scope and sequence in 1980 was "still based fundamentally on the 1916 NEA report" (178). Since the belief in progress had eroded and since 85 reform "itself is based on a belief in progress," the def- inition of progress had to shift "more in terms of improving the quality of life in a stable society, less in terms of piling up possessions in an ever-expanding economy" (182). The years since 1980 have changed little. In his 1989 presidential address to NCSS, Donald 0. Schneider said ”the current reality seems one of chaos, especially in social studies" (152). Several movements that plan to reverse the trend will be recounted (see pp. 140 and 218). t st This section relies on Hannah Arendt's account of the idea of history, both ancient and modern, to sketch a perspective from which to view contemporary history. The ancients were more open-minded than we because they believed greatness was a self-evident quality that conferred immortality (Arendt 1968, 52). The Greeks' concern with greatness was based upon an urge to immor- tality, "to be the best, to be the best of all." The ancients did not confuse great words and deeds with natural processes or as parts of an encompassing whole but rather as single deeds or events that interrupted the circular move- ment of daily life. The subject of history to the Greeks, in other words, was the extraordinary (Arendt 1968, 43). Herodotus saw the task of history as saving human deeds from "the futility that comes from oblivion;" the task of the 86 historian was to immortalize greatness (41). Homer, Herod- otus, and Thucydides praised friend and foe alike. Their unique impartiality did not survive Christianity which held that "neither the world nor the ever-recurring cycle of life is immortal, only the single living individual.“ In addi- tion, modern political philosophy made Thucydidean objec- tivity impossible by its "stress on the all-importance of self-interest" (52). Since we have made life our supreme and foremost con- cern, we have no room left for an activity based on contempt for one's own life-interest. Selflessness may still be a religious or a moral virtue; it can hardly be a political one. Under these conditions objectivity lost its validity in experience, was divorced from real life, and became that "lifeless" academic affair which Droysen rightly denounced as being eunuchic (Arendt 1968, 53). To Vico (1668-1743), who is often regarded as the father of modern history, history held a fascination con- trary to that of the ancients'. Its domain was no longer the words and deeds of singular persons or events but a process. History was more like technology because to Vico human action accomplished in the realm of history what he thought divine action accomplished in the realm of nature: it unleashed processes. Ancient history had been an account of interruptions; modern history took on the seamless qual- ity of a process. The rise of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the loss of confidence in the "truth-revealing capacity of the senses" (54) and, 87 therefore, to an alienation from the world. No longer could the senses assume their conclusions about the world: that the earth revolves around the sun had been proven, yet the discovery was counter-intuitive. This loss of faith in the senses meant doubt about the reality of the outer world entered human perception. The consequence of the loss of a common world was subjectivization: sensation therefore became more "real" than the "sensed" object and the only safe ground of experience. All historical judgments were reduced to the level of sensations and ended "on the lowest level of all sensations, the level of taste." All judgments not inspired by moral principle (which is felt to be old-fashioned) or not dictated by some self- interest are considered matters of "taste," and this in hardly a different sense from what we mean by saying that the preference for clam chowder over pea soup is a matter of taste. This conviction, the vulgarity of its defenders on the theoretical level notwithstanding, has disturbed the conscience of the historian much more deeply because it has much deeper roots in the general spirit of the modern age than the allegedly superior scientific standards of his colleagues in the natural sciences (Arendt 1968, 53). The contemporary decline of interest in the humanities, and especially in the study of history, which seems inevitable in all completely modernized countries, is quite in accord with the first impulses that led to modern historical science (58). In the nineteenth century the natural and historical sciences were opposed, though we know today physics "is no less a man-centered inquiry into what is than historical research" (49). Objectivity then came to mean noninter- ference as well as nondiscrimination. These scientific standards derived from Aristotelian and medieval natural 88 science "which consisted mainly in observing and cataloging observed facts" (50). The problem of scientific objectivity, as the nineteenth century posed it, owed so much to historical self- misunderstanding and philosophical confusion that the real issue at stake, the issue of impartiality, which is indeed decisive not only for the "science" of history but for all historiography from poetry and storytelling onward, has become difficult to recognize (51). In the nineteenth century the new social sciences, which ”may use the experiment in a much cruder and less reliable way than do the natural sciences," (59) became the hand- maiden to history as technology had been handmaiden to physics: they too prescribe conditions, conditions to human behavior, as modern physics prescribes conditions to natural processes. If their vocabulary is repulsive and their hope to close the alleged gap between our scien- tific mastery of nature and our deplored impotence to "manage" human affairs through an engineering science of human relations sounds frightening, it is only because they have decided to treat man as an entirely natural being whose life process can be handled the same way as all other processes (59). In our own time we have seen humans act upon nature, unleashing natural process whose outcomes have not always been unpredictable. When the atom was split, for example, the unprecedented character of the action showed the inade- quacy of history to furnish a framework for understanding. History in such cases more resembles the history of science, a ruin of discarded concepts that requires immense effort to retrieve what deserves to be remembered. 89 Studieutlextheeke Books about United States textbooks in education have appeared in this century. Bessie L. Pierce's Civic Atti- udes in American School Textbooks was published in 1913. In 1931 the National Society for the Study of Education devoted one volume of its Yearbook to The Textbook in American Education. Other significant studies include Lee Cronbach's Text Materials in Modern Education (1955), Charles Carpenter's History of American Schoolbooks (1963, 1966), Ruth Miller Elson's Guardians of Tradition (1964), and John A. Neitz's Old Textbooks (1961) and The Evolution of American Secondary School Textbooks (1966). Pierce's study analyzed the content of textbooks for attitudes toward citizenship. Cronbach's volume drew upon writers in different areas of textbook study; it reiterated the notion that textbooks warranted scholarly examination and outlined potential areas of study. Neitz and Carpenter documented textbook contents and influences in the nineteenth century. Elson, by viewing books of the same period not only as documents but also as literature, enlarged the scope of textbook study: her interpretive reading of nineteenth century textbooks revealed how a society viewed itself through the view it accorded its children. Other studies will appear under their respective subjects. 90 W The first United States history textbook was compiled by John M'Culloch in 1787. Geographies first appeared in 1784 and combined geography, history and civics (Neitz 1961, 235). .In the 18303 Samuel G. Goodrich, whose pen name was Peter Parley, introduced a series of graded United States history textbooks that moralized as well as informed. The authors of early American history textbooks stated as their aims character training, patriotism, good citizen- ship, and improvement of memory and thinking (238-239). Early United States history textbooks gave almost fifty per cent of their space to war; fifteen per cent, to politics and government. Cultural factors composed less than two per cent of space and religion made up most of them (257). According to Elson, nineteenth century textbooks aimed ”to train the heart rather than the head" (226), "to mold the wax in virtue rather than in learning" (1). These books were not secular: "a sense of God permeates all books as surely as a sense of nationalism" and that reli- gion was exclusively Christian but Roman Catholic (41). .Not only was there a hierarchy of religions but also of races: By the end of the century it was widely assumed that nature had conferred specific characteristics on each member of a racial group throughout historical time. Furthermore races could be classified according to the desirability of their traits (65) But whatever the racial subdivisions, throughout the century whites are ranked at the top and Negroes at the 91 bottom (67). Nationality, like race, for a century increasingly fond of ”genetic explanations,” was immutable. Like race, nation- ality was believed to be biologically determined, but, unlike race, it demanded loyalty from each individual. It enlarged the individual's field of action to the nation group, yet it limited "his development to the potentiali- ties of his nationality" (101). Lesser nations were mindlessly castigated: "Much evil is done in China and everywhere else" (103); "Many vices prevail in Spain and everywhere else" (149). The United States, England, and Switzerland could count themselves among the few chosen nations. The idea of mission, continuous from John Winthrop's City on a Hill to Lincoln's Second Inaugural, "is so firmly embedded that one almost looks for the idea of conquest in the schoolbooks" (296). They compared the movement west to the Israelites' wanderings and glorified the nation's past to the point of blind worship. Few books included the Declaration of Independence, and none discussed its poli- tical philosophy: "It is to be revered but not examined" (289). Romantic nationalism led textbook authors to deify heroes: Franklin is the apotheosis of the great man; Washington of the hero. Their biographies are regarded as guides to action for the youth of American, and they reveal what the society considered desirable in individual and social behavior. 92 One is tempted to conclude that they chose the hero less because he was one in reality than because he was an illustration of what to them was ideal behavior (186). The Franklin who appeared in textbooks was not the cosmo- politan or the democrat but the apotheosis of the self-made man. Washington bore "more resemblance to Jesus Christ than to any human being" (194). Although pre-Civil War books stressed the ideas of social station and contentment with one's lot, the idea of mission extended to the commonwealth. Each book accepted steady and inevitable progress "toward greater material wealth and comfort as well as toward greater virtue and freedom" (258) as the law of United States history and never questioned it. Elson observed "how the constant copying of one text by another often perpetuated older ideas" (106). The Amer- ican Revolution occupied more space in these texts than any other single event and appeared mainly as a recital of battles. The accounts of wars by authors such as Emma Willard were so gory that it would have been "hard for the reader to discover exactly what issues were in dispute during the war" (120). The spellers were full of military words (329). Elson concluded that the textbooks' glori- fication of war and military heroes engendered nationalism. The United States described by nineteenth century textbooks was an agricultural nation; its citizens care- fully cultivated nature and were suspicious of any art and 93 learning outside of the practical. Nineteenth century textbooks portrayed a view of American character as practical, moral, and hardworking. The rejection of the intellectual required the rejec- tion of an intellectual past--that of the Puritans and of the founders of the Republic--as part of the Ameri- can tradition. The frontier did not need scholarship, whereas "useful knowledge" was essential to survival. And the needs of the frontier were probably reinforced by the needs of expanding business (230). Education to the writers of these schoolbooks did not mean "developing the logical and critical powers of the individual" but was "a process of indoctrination in national tradition" (313). The world they created was "a fantasy made up by adults as a guide for their children, . . . an ideal world, peopled by ideal villains as well as ideal heroes" (337). They assumed "the moral character of the universe" and "made no pretense of neutrality" (338). While they evade issues seriously controverted in their day, they take a firm and unanimous stand on matters of basic belief. The value judgment is their stock in trade: love of country, love of God, duty to parents, the necessity to develop habits of thrift, honesty, and hard work in order to accumulate property, the cer- tainty of progress, the perfection of the United States. These are not to be questioned (338). Although these books oversimplified life often to the point of absurdity, they did convey to children "that life is hard and full of natural and man-made pitfalls" (339). Because the nation itself was still being defined, nine- teenth century textbooks had to prescribe what it meant to be American, while European schoolbooks had only to 94 describe what it meant to be French or German or other nationality. W The study of literary style is at least as old as Aristotle, yet what style is is not altogether clear, despite the efforts of literary theorists, linguists, semioticians, and researchers in discourse analysis. Style can be defined as "the deviation from a norm, or at least from statistically preponderant usage" (Alter 1989, 81). In United States history textbook writing this norm is "the so-called telegraphic style" (FitzGerald 1979, 51). This "static, neo-Confucian style" (59) began in the 18903 and even dampened the individual voices of the best textbook writers in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These included David Saville Muzzey, Willis Mason West, Charles and Mary Beard, Albert Bushnell Hart, and other notable historians. What was lost with "the assumption of this impersonal voice" (51) in most textbook writing was a certain intimacy in the relationship between reader and writer. This development was simultaneous with the conception of history as a science. Although the distinc- tion between humanities and sciences has been much con- fused, certain differences mark historical from scientific writing. Bruner (1986) divided cognitive functioning into two 95 modes, the narrative and the paradigmatic. The narrative mode "deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course" (13). The paradigmatic mode "employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, instantiated, idealized, and related one ' to the other to form a system" (12). The narrative mode Bruner described could correspond to narrative history, especially in its role in the teaching of children. The paradigmatic mode could correspond to the new social history which depends on social science and statistical techniques. In contrast to our vast knowledge of how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that story must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action: agent, intention or goal, situation, instrument, something corresponding to a "story grammar." The other landscape is the landscape of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think, or feel (14). That history is non-fiction does not exempt it from being a story or collection of stories, for history is not pure information: "The history of any event is never precisely the same thing to two different persons; and it is well known that every generation writes the same history in a new way, and puts upon it a new construction" (Becker 1955, 193). History can also be considered a collection of stories, for any historical fact is really "a 96 generalization of a thousand and one simpler facts" (187). Yet, to return to Bruner, "there must be transformations of some kind that permit a common base structure of story to be handled in different meaning-preserving sequences" (19). The Russian literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov (1977) said these transformations permit "discourse to require a meaning without this meaning becoming pure information" (30). He classified transformations as simple or complex ones. Those that transform the action of a verb from being an accomplished thing to being psychologically in process are simple transformations. These he divided into six categories: mode, intention, result, manner, aspect and status. He also proposed six complex transformations that modify the original or main verb phrase by ascribing a state of mental activity, whether of appearance, knowledge, supposition, description, subjectification, or attitude. Bruner's research group compared 113 sentences of fiction and non-fiction writing for the number of simple and complex transformations. The fiction account contained on average two transformations per sentence; the non- fiction account, one every other sentence. In analyzing the responses of one reader who told back the story a day after having heard it, Bruner's group found twice as many simple transformations and at least as many complex ones in the reader's recall of the fictional story as in the non- fiction one. The most interesting qualitative 97 transformation in the retelling was "the reader's manage- , ment of subjunctivity" (33). Although results for only one reader made conclusions premature, Bruner suggested "the actual text needs the subjunctivity that makes it possible for a reader to create a world of his own" (37). By subjunctivity Bruner meant the mode "trafficking in human possibilities rather than in settled certainties" (26). In other words, the presence of Todorov transforma- tions in a text provided a means of reader identification and involvement: if a text is not rich in the "subjunc- tivity" of its characters, a reader is less likely to be stimulated by the account. These findings may have impli- cations for textbook writing. In their zealousness for history to become a science, to apply a distinction made elsewhere, some historians may have mistaken a research finding for a scientific one (Gibboney 1989, 26). To engage a child reader whose mind cannot supply all of the categories of a paradigmatic system, a textbook must rather spur interest with a narrative of "human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course." Egan (1978) called stories the "linguistic unit which alone can fix the emotional, or affective, meaning of events" (5) and engage a reader's interest. According to Aristotle, a story's beginning sets up an expectation, a middle that may complicate it, and an end that satisfies it 98 (Egan 1979, 132). "Historically, the connection between memory and imagination was the story" (1989, 457). By this statement, Egan meant the element of story serves to shape memory by evoking the imagination. Stories work by embedding their contents into vivid events and images that carry strong emotional coloring. These events and images are organized between a begin- ning, which typically sets up a binary conflict that is then elaborated through vivid characters and events, and an end, which resolves the conflict (1989, 456). Without the element of story, an account would have no meaning. For the study of history Egan believed "meta- histories" or general schemes for organization were neces- sary, for "unorganized particulars by themselves are meaningless" (1983, 79). Since the fundamental emotional and moral categories for young children are binary opposites, they might serve to organize the content of stories for them (1979, 131-132). One purpose of liter- ature is to inform the emotions, to provide "the student with something that he or she does not already have--a situation, at least. The core of the emotional experience is in the book (film, etc.), and the student enters into it" (Solomon 1986, 55). To enter into an emotion "is to participate in a way of being in the world, a way in which things matter, a way charged with shared understandings and obsessions" (44-45). Scheffler (1977) called the viewing of emotion as something separate from reason utterly destructive of education. 99 Egan saw the role of teachers as storytellers, "tel- lers of our culture's tales" (1989, 459). There is a storylessness about some contemporary textbooks that may be a function of their style: the role of storyteller itself is absent. Without a storyteller there can be no point of insertion in the narrative for the hearer or reader. Currently the most common textbook style chosen by authors, sometimes referred to as 'textbookese', is an objective, unelaborated, straightforward style empha- sizing the ideational function of language with an anonymous, authoritative 'author' reporting a body of facts in one proposition after another (Crismore 1989, 142). The ideational function of language includes information about the world, the phenomena of the external world and of consciousness (Halliday 1978, 1985). The other two func- tions, according to Halliday, are the textual role, which forms language into connected text, and the interpersonal role, which expresses how an author interacts with readers or hearers. An author's presence in a text exemplifies metadis- course, which Williams (1985) defined as "writing about writing" (Beauvais 1986, 2). Crismore identified two rhetorical styles, one with and one without metadiscourse. Every text features primary discourse which is the "prop- ositional content--the ideational part"; in texts that feature both types of discourse, the presence of metadis- course serves to mediate between primary discourse and the reader. Unlike the ideational content, the function of 100 metadiscourse is "to direct rather than inform" the reader (4). According to Crismore (1989, 140), adults, especially educators, tend to underestimate the interpersonal and textual roles of language. Readability has been found a major factor in the use of metadiscourse (Williams 1981). To investigate this finding, Crismore (1983) examined the types and amounts of metadiscourse in eighteen textbook and non-textbook social science resources between grades four and college level (32). She classified metadiscourse into informational and attitudinal categories with subcategories for each. The metadiscourse consisted of words, phrases or clauses and was expressed in either first, second or third person. According to Crismore "the amount and kind of metadiscourse and person used for it in a text can be viewed as an index of author intrusion, author personality, and the author/ reader relationship" (35). She concluded that both text- books and non-textbooks featured both types of metadis- course but differed qualitatively among subcategories. In addition, the amounts and types of metadiscourse across grade levels did vary. In a 1983 study, Crismore noted that textbooks tend to feature less metadiscourse than non-textbooks. She divided 120 sixth-grade social studies students into two groups, based upon their score on the Social Studies Com- fort Index, and administered several reading passages as 101 written in a textbook with varying amounts of added meta- discourse. Based upon her findings "adding informational forms of metadiscourse improves comprehension, especially for low-vocabulary, low-ability students" (44) and "adding attitudinal metadiscourse helps students understand and remember the author's attitudes, feelings, and opinions" (45). Results were inconclusive in that "just adding meta- discourse to a poorly written text is not enough to enhance student performance and attitudes" (45). Crismore (1984) asserted that a rhetorical style featuring metadiscourse may be more appropriate for textbooks than an unelaborated, anonymous style" (Beauvais 1986, 47). Beauvais questioned whether a reader's recognizing metadiscourse depended on developmental considerations. Obviously, the quality of the discourse itself may be a significant factor in assist- ing a child reader. In her doctoral dissertation, Crismore (1985) found that differences in metadiscourse had "little impact on students' ability to read and remember information from texts" (40). She qualified her findings with the fact that the addition of metadiscourse to the reading passages effectively doubled their length and resulted in a 40 per cent increase in reading time, which may have been a factor in students' unfavorable attitudes toward the longer pas- sages. The study's results were further vitiated by sub- tests which contained information present in the 102 metadiscourse portions of the passages. Despite the anom- alies in the study, Crismore found that an interpersonal voice conveyed by metadiscourse helped low-comfort and hurt high-comfort students. As the intricacies of Hell and Pur- gatory made Dante summon Vergil to guide him, so, perhaps, must history furnish a guide to a child reader. To make history readable, to explain its complexities, and to cor- rect the presentist tendencies in inexperienced readers would appear to require a narrator, however unobtrusively. The phenomenon of a single narrative voice, such as that of Muzzey, however, has been replaced by the heavily edited voices of historians, consultants, and writers in development houses. Since best-selling textbooks are valuable commod- ities, publishers revise old standards rather than retool new ones; "like cars, textbooks are expensive to design and relatively cheap to duplicate" (FitzGerald 1980, 46). This practice of revision, often visible by varying typefaces, lends itself to fragmentation. "These apparently solid, authoritative tomes‘are in fact the most nervous of objects, constantly changing in style as well as in polit- ical content" (47). The "big basic history textbook," according to FitzGerald, is "a kind of lowest common denom- inator of American tastes" (46), and "the old progressive civics-as-history mold" accomodates that taste (190). Con- tent emphasis often fluctuates with political and 103 educational climates. FitzGerald quoted a textbook publishing employee. The reactions of the textbook business aren't all that fast. It takes five years or more to get a book out, start to finish, so back in the mid-sixties we were really caught. I remember the N.C.S.S. (National Council on the Social Studies) Convention in 1968. It was all green. The display rooms were covered with stuff about ecology. The next year there weren't too many green things left. It was all black. Black Studies. And the hardware had all gone--all the audiovisuals vanished. There were only books left and sixteen-millimeter filmstrips with self-threaders. Now it's drugs. A while ago it was like reading problems--you kept it under the rug. But then the rug hits the ceiling and you're stampeded. Now it's 'Doesn't everyone have a drug problem?' Now that the kids have given it up for alcohol, well, it's all fine, but what about the development costs for these things? Some companies have gone out of business trying to keep up (preface). Not only content but style is affected by publishing practice. Editorial control resides not with the historian but with the textbook editor. "In the matter of prose style, the editors invariably impose constraints on the writer" (FitzGerald 1980, 23), and since "few historians can contrive to write by these rules, the editors usually have to rewrite the essential meaning of the original, but, almost necessarily, they remove all individuality from the writing, homogenizing it so that it is in fact nearly unreadable" (24). FitzGerald found more political and stylistic latitude given to "authors of texts for literate eleventh or twelfth graders than to authors of histories for the lower grades, with the result that only the very 104 sophisticated texts contain any original historical writing" (25). Some textbooks, according to FitzGerald, were strangely out of character for the historian listed as author: "the difference between two editions of the same text is often so great that a historian would have had to undergo a conversion, or possession by another historian, in order to write both" (21). In fact, "a number of the distinguished historians named on the covers died long before the current editions of the texts were published" (21). Thus, the way publishers fabricate textbooks may be another factor responsible for fragmentation of both style and content. ethods o e t 00 a Textbook analysis, according to Posner (1989), has followed two strands: the content analysis and the textbook criticism approaches (350). Content analysis "does not seem to have any methodological commitment, although the usual procedure is to count instances of significant words or phrases, to place them in predetermined categories . . . and then to compute some index using a formula" (350). The goal of such an approach is commonly to determine bias, reading level or some other characteristic. Siler (1986) found the content analysis approach used frequently in studying the treatment of specific groups (83), themes 105 (90), and events (92). Journalism techniques of content analysis have been applied to textbooks (90). The meth- odology of the textbook criticism approach is borrowed from the qualitative methods of literary criticism; its aim is to understand the "blind spots, overemphases, and influ- ences" of text material. The two approaches have often been combined; Siler approved only those content analyses that were "objective, systematic, and quantitative," in other words, those that permitted replication (91). Objectivity, in the eyes of some researchers, however, has become a "highly problematic concept" (Gilbert 1989, 61). Although the reliability of content analysis can be high, "given close definitions of rules of classi- fication, training of coders designed to produce so-called low inference measures," the selection of "textual elements to be counted is of course a high inference step, since there is no low inference way of deciding what aspects of a text are in fact the important ones to identify and ana- lyze" (63). Gilbert concluded that the reputed objectivity of content analysis is spurious because it ignores the fact that importance and frequency are not necessarily related and called instead for a method of textual analysis that emphasized "their structured and contextually grounded character" (63). An equally persistent concern in the content analysis of textbooks has been unit of analysis. Counts of the 106 frequency of words, for example, can be misleading in that a word will not always have the same meaning in a different context. Some studies have assumed a word has the same meaning not only within a textbook but also in other text- books and in textbooks written at different times (62). In addition, choosing the unit of analysis is a decision that involves identifying the limits within which a state- ment's meaning is fully and discretely established. Given that meanings are progressively constructed in the course of reading a text, through such processes as iteration, recursivity and anticipation, to suggest that a meaningful unit can be isolated in this way oversimplifies the way textual meaning is produced by the reader. It also ignores the way a text is sequenced and organized, which is no less important in the construction of meaning than the individual elements of a text (62). Scribner (1979) reported that the social community is a necessary unit of analysis in studies of textbook use--warrants closer attention. In most research on educational practices, social purposes and social processes operate as unex- amined background. Until a comparative perspective forces us to look at education in other times and places, we may overlook the pervasive influence which social context exerts on uses of text (15). Although this study focuses on textbooks as written, pub- lishers obviously attend to how they will be used in designing them; thus, this topic will be treated in a later section. To give example of a method that considered the "structured and contextually grounded character" of text- books, Gilbert (1984) coined the word "image" to describe a diagram of a theory or set of theories and their associated 107 concepts, facts, conclusions and applications. Such a representation would show how social theory in a text "constructs and articulates social problems by generating textual elements such as facts, concepts and generaliz- ations, and by relating these elements to each other and to the problems which the theory addresses" (65). The proce- dure could be followed by addressing these questions: 1. What topics, propositions or broad concepts provide the organizing structure of the discourse? 2. How do concepts, terms, metaphors, jargon and other stylistic devices elaborate the structure of the discourse? 3. What are the underlying problems which have generated this discourse? 4. What theories provide the descriptions and explana- tions thought relevant? What relationships, causes, consequences are proposed? On what premises is the account based and what assumptions are made in the course of the explanation? 5. What perspectives, questions, theories are not acknowledged (Gilbert 1989)? Gilbert called Anyon's (1979b) study of secondary history textbooks an example of a structuralist method. Anyon used techniques from a study of bias by Dance (1960) to focus on the treatment of economic and labor history in secondary-level United States history textbooks. Anyon applied both quantitative and qualitative techniques, focusing on direct and indirect manifestations of ideology. According to Gilbert, Structuralism, as a feature of semiological analysis of ideology, posits an underlying logic from which the sets of relations in meaning systems are derived. The 108 task for structuralist analysis is to identify this system and how it generates meanings (64). Interestingly, Anyon's study, like those of FitzGerald and Dance, depended heavily on knowledge of history. Seventeen widely used secondary-level United States history textbooks were found to reflect an ideology that served the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others. Anyon found textbooks offered concrete examples of "suc- cess" and "failure" in social, economic, and political matters (1979, 383). These examples, by omission and selection, channelized evidence for the reader: "Evidence of what constitutes success or failure, whether or not it coincides with actual fact, provides a compelling guide for making choices today" (383). Textbook reports of poverty, for example, regarded it as "a consequence of the failure of individuals, rather than of the failure of society to distribute economic resources universally" (383). Anyon advocated diverse instead of monolithic perspectives to "provide genuine alternatives to standardized knowledge" (386). DexelQemental_Q2naideration§_in_§esial_§tudiea Developmental schemes in education involve the idea that individuals proceed sequentially through stages. These stages, according to Rosenzweig , "represent qualitatively different and increasingly complex systems" (1982, 1). A developmental perspective also "includes the related idea 109 that development requires exposure to experiences that create cognitive dissonance, that force the individual to search for more adequate ways to organize and process ideas and actions" (1). Developmental theories, thus, are stage theories. Stenhouse (1975) was wary of developing curricula according to developmental norms not only because "educa- tion exists to change such norms, but also because the pupils in any one class are at different stages of develop- ment." The most important function of such norms, he pro- posed, "may be diagnostic and individual" (30). Similarly, according to Brown (1982) the "aims and objectives of a developmental approach center on the learner more than on specific content or subjects in the curriculum," although the degree to which a subject "is in harmony with the goals of a developmental approach depends largely on how that subject is conceived" (32). In the 19603 and 19703 Hallam found that teaching history was at odds with developmental considerations because adolescents did not attain the stage of formal thought until the age of sixteen and not at the age of eleven or twelve as Piaget had originally estimated. The stage of formal thought is thatwhich involves abstract operations. Laville and Rosenzweig (1982) found fault with Hallam's study because his view of history and pedagogical approach were too narrow. First, they agreed with his 110 finding that "the results of this research show the short- comings and lack of full understanding that are likely to arise in traditional textbook history," but they pointed out that this finding did not mean that secondary-school students cannot learn history (1972, 338). Second, the research has not established any real relationship between the presence or absence of formal thought and the performance of the students who parti- cipated in the experiments. Third, the studies have not shown that the fundmental nature of the discipline of history is inherently too abstract for high-school students to grasp (63). To counter the abstract content of history textbooks, Laville and Rosenzweig (1982) recommended "the opportunity for students to work with historical materials which match their cognitive capacities and hence the possibility for them to progress toward formal thinking in relation to the study of history" (60). Kohlberg (1979) warned educators not to commit the "psychologist's fallacy," that of confusing psychological findings about human growth and development with educa- tional aims. Egan (1979) found learning theories were misapplied. Typical psychological theories of learning are as little related to education as typical psychological theories of development. We simply do not have an educational theory of learning. Such a theory would focus, not on the mechanics of the learning process, but on those aspects of learning of most importance to education (162). Egan (1983) asserted that "North American children have had virtually no systematic history teaching at the elementary 111 level for more than half a century now." He argued that the history-less curriculum came out of an earlier develop- mental psychology than Dewey's or Piaget's, and that further developmental theories "which claim that the concepts and skills necessary for historical thinking do not develop until well into adolescence have tended to persuade educators to reduce or eliminate teaching history to young children" (69). Psychological developmental or structuralist theories, according to Egan, separate process from content._ A It does matter whether the student is learning about ancient Greece, or the Medieval Papacy, or local and recent history, and arguments must be made and good reasons given for composing a curriculum of some of these contents at one time and others at others. We are in significant part as educated people what we have learned (68). He defined the history teachers' Catch-22: "only if they see the relevance of historical knowledge will students be interested and learn, but it is impossible to show them the relevance of historical knowledge until after they have learned a considerable amount of history" (70-71). Egan outlined Plato's parable of the line and sketched a four- stage developmental model similar to eikasia, pistis, dianoia, noesis. Egan divided educational development into four stages, each corresponding to a range in age: the mythic stage, ages four or five to nine or ten years; the romantic stage, ages eight to nine to fourteen or fifteen years; the 112 philosophic age, ages fourteen or fifteen to nineteen or twenty years; and the ironic stage, nineteen or twenty years through adulthood. One way of characterizing this development "is as a gradual escape from the domination of the story form" (1979, 157). This sequence would acknowl- edge the central importance of content and organize it . "into the kind of unit that fixes meaning and coheres with the other characteristics of children's thinking" (17). Egan characterized the prevailing curriculum as one "which seems intent on suppressing, burying, or atrophying chil- dren's vivid mental categories in local detail and trivia" (1979b, 134). Ravitch (1987) also found elementary social studies curriculum inappropriate. She found "a national curriculum in the social studies." Regardless of the state or the school district, children in kindergarten and the first three grades study home, family neighbors, and the local community; children in fourth grade study state history; children in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades study American history; high school seniors study American government, economics, and civics. The content of the social studies in the other grades varies, although the typical pattern is supposed to include world cultures in sixth grade; world geography in seventh grade; civics or world cultures in ninth grade; world history in tenth grade. The courses in the sixth, seventh, ninth, and tenth grades may or may not be offered, and they may be replaced by one of the social sciences or electives or eliminated altogether, depending on the requirements of the individual state or local district" (343). She described the early grades as "virtually content-free. In kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third 113 grade, the social studies curriculum is overwhelmingly sociological and economic" (343). This curriculum of "expanding environments," introduced in the U.S. by Paul Hanna in the 19303, "contains no mythology, legends, biographies, hero tales, or great events in the life of this nation or any other. It is tot sociology" (344). Larkins, Hawkins, and Gilmore (1987) studied nonin- formative content in primary-level social studies text- books. Noninformative content was defined as either trivial, "needlessly redundant," or already familiar to children (300). Noninformative content also included "superfluous information"--knowledge children would acquire without instruction. If a text included only two or three sentences about a topic, the information was "superficial." Where information was important or useful but was not appropriate to textbooks it was classed "text inappro- priate." An example would be children going on a field trip, which was labeled "hall of mirrors, because it reminds us of looking into a mirror that faces another mirror on the opposite wall" (300). Other types of noninformative content included "sanitized information, biased information, and aimless information" (301). The authors did not attempt quantitative content analysis because "qualitative reviews of texts are more informative" (302), and the "goal was not quantification, but recollection of content" (303). When it came to 114 citizenship education, examples of freedom were absent, although "surrounded by a legion of rules" (310). The authors recommended destroying "the stranglehold of the expanding horizons rationale," abolishing social studies textbooks for grade one and possibly grade two, developing a clear conception of citizenship education for elementary social studies, and not fearing the word memorize. z s duca 0 he Stenhouse (1975) called society's intellectual emo- tional, and technical capital "public traditions" (6). Imparting these public traditions has been the aim of education in all countries; uniquely, perhaps, the focus in the United States has been on citizenship education, especially in the social studies. The 1916 Report to the National Education Association committee on the Social Studies stated that the objective of the social studies curriculum was to produce the good citizen (Oliver 1957, 20). In 1929 the American Historical Association's Com- mission on the Social Studies undertook a study in which Charles Beard was instrumental in formulating the Commis- sion's definitions of basic values for both society and individuals. Beard (1934) stated only a "frame of refer- ence," and not empiricism, could produce a citizen with those values. By its very nature (neutrality) empiricism is precluded from attempting to set objectives for instruction in the social sciences, for this 115 operation is posited upon a declaration of values or preferences, within the limits of necessity. Since such objectives inherently involve the assertion of values to be attained, empiricism cannot pass judgment upon them without setting up values of its own, that is, violating its method. Nor can empir- icism prepare any program of instruction in the social sciences. Such a program involves choices which the scientific method is powerless to make. . . . In short, pure empiricism and education are contradictions (Shaver and Berlak, 54-55). Thus Beard precisely located the controversial and, therefore, political nature of the social studies, for how "something becomes 'official knowledge' is always a political process" (Apple 1989, 20). Beard described the process by which curriculum decisions are made. The extent to which the realities disclosed by empir- icism can be taught as descriptions in any particular institution of learning depends not merely upon the truth of the matter; it depends in part upon the pressures which such interests exert on educational authorities. In any case, educational statecraft, not empiricism, must decide this issue in setting up objectives and curricula for the schools (Shaver and Berlak, 58). In contemporary terms, educational statecraft may well come down to "a matter of taste, and consensus will be determined . . . by horse trading between parties to assure a place for their favorite people, works, or his- torical events" (Newmann 1988, 436). This use of the word taste, however, recalls Arendt's reminder that gustatory taste and erudition are not identical. Tradition, to remain vital, depends on "authoritative interpretation" (Friedrich 1963). To Beard it also depended on a "frame of social knowledge, ideas, and 116 ideals--a more or less definite pattern of things deemed necessary, things deemed possible, and things deemed desirable" (Shaver and Berlak, 15). Neither a social need nor a problem was an objective condition but "is a conception which arises in connection with one's frame of reference" (16). According to Becker, even history's "imagined picture of the actual event is always deter- mined by two things: (1) by the actual event itself inso- far as we can know something about it; and (2) by our own present purposes, desires, prepossessions, and prej- udices" (1955, 192). Citizenship education, according to Hertzberg, has composed the intellectual framework of the social studies with history at its core. Citizenship education, despite gaps in the social studies' chronology, has been the most consistent tradition, although as Shaver (1981) reminded, it is neither "the exclusive domain of social studies," (105) nor "a unitary field" (106). Williams (1976) urged a certain wariness about the connotations of tradition. It is sometimes observed, by those who have looked into particular traditions, that it only takes two generations to make anything traditional: natur- ally enough, since that is the sense of tradition as active process. But the word moves again and again towards age-old and towards ceremony, duty and res- pect. Considering only how much has been handed down to us, and how various it actually is, this, in its own way, is both a betrayal and a surrender (269). Like Williams's definition, the tradition of citizenship education has assumed a range and variety that is both a 117 betrayal and a surrender of its beginnings. For example, in their 1978 ethnographic study of social studies teachers, Stake and Easely "found that socialization was the preemptive aim of schooling" (Leming, 404). Only ten years later Engle and Ochoa moved full-circle: "counter- socialization is the real goal of citizenship education in a democracy" (113). Perhaps the most exacting definition citizenship education can sustain is implicit in the plural form of the words social studies: The overarching goal of "responsible citizenship" illustrates the first problem--that of ambiguity. This might be defined as "understanding the American heritage," but this is equally vague, for American history can be understood through several conflicting interpretations (Newmann 1977, 12). Oliver (1976) accounted for the lack of a coherent ideology in public schools by the emphasis on the modern value of individual choice. A school was to serve as "a neutral supermarket" and not "promote any comprehensive conception of citizenship prescribed as good for all students" (Newmann 1977, 10). The idea of citizenship education, according to Newmann, suggested "a general conformity to prevailing social norms" (10). He found "the confusion in civic education can be traced to lack of clarity and/or disagreement on the ultimate community referent for citizenship" (23). Advocates of partici- patory citizenship education, for instance, make the case for an active citizenry, yet the norms for citizen 118 participation on a national level are minimal in a repub- lic where one member of Congress represents 500,000 persons. According to their [modern political scientists'] view, the most important characteristic of the American political system was that it worked--which is to say that it generated decisions that agencies of government were able to enforce because the elec- torate accepted their legitimacy. On this basis, the competence of the voters was not doubtful so much as irrelevant to a viable politics, which reduced to the peaceful resolution of conflicts. In effect, politi- cal science substituted the political process for education as the key principle in American democratic theory (Welter 1962, 320). Political science has made citizenship education, in its participatory sense, as vestigial as the village green. Stenhouse (1975) located the source of school know- ledge outside the school: it "is teaching a content on which it has a lease rather than a possession. In most cases possession is felt to lie in some group outside the school which acts as a point of reference and a source of standards" (12). Some outside influences are latent. Berlak (1977) called attention to schooling's belonging to one of the largest bureaucracies and political economic concentrations of all time, the modern industrial capitalist state. Yet simplism generally prevails in most statements of "rationale" or objec- tives. Relatively few teachers or curriculum spe- cialists have come to terms with the implications of the fact that schools are government agencies and that governments in all modern industrial states are subject and respond to powerful economic pressures, legal, illegal, covert and overt, exerted by many groups--particularly those that are well organized and financed, and determined to protect their own interests (36-37). 119 Culture is another source of school knowledge. According to "cultural marxists," such as Apple, culture itself reflects economic and social differences. The first [premise] is that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, espe- cially with class and class formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs. And the third, which follows the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but site of social differences and struggles" (1988, 19- 20) . Cultural disparities are often downplayed: FitzGerald referred to textbooks' frequent silences (1980, 150). To single out cultural disparities exclusively would tend to underplay elements that unite diverse groups as citizens, but to omit cultural disparities would increase student cynicism. According to Stenhouse, the school can influence curriculum in two ways. "First it offers content which may contradict or reinforce its expressed curricular intentions but which is not publicly acknowledged" (40). Second, it offers content by means of the explicit curriculum which puts the school's curricular intentions into practice. The first way is often called the hidden curriculum which either escapes the school's control of policy or exists by "underground or half-acknowledged policy control." One shaper of the hidden curriculum is 120 what critics have called social control, which has come to mean tradition, the tendency of schooling to preserve the status quo. A third way the school can influence curriculum is by omission; this practice has been called the null curriculum, the significant parts of a curric- ulum that are left out (Eisner 1985; Flinders, Noddings, and Thornton 1986). FitzGerald, for example, noted the absence or muting of conflict in many United States his- tory textbooks (1980, 155). The ways in which textbooks are used partly deter- mines how publishers design them and whether educators select them. "One of the chief lessons of our curriculum history is that curriculum improvement is dependent on teacher participation in identifying problems and in their intelligent and active engagement in seeking solutions" (Tanner and Tanner 1990, 17). Apple (1983b) called the decisions of educators that affect curriculum content means of "technical control . . . controls embedded in the physical structure of the job" (146). For example, Stake and Easely (1978) found teachers' resistance to materials that did not fit their modes of classroom control or that did not produce positive student attitudes toward the United States (Shaver 1981, 122-123). McNeil (1986) studied social studies teachers who "bracketed" their personal knowledge "in order to get through the 'official' knowledge of the course" when they 121 feared students would become cynical by discussing con- troversial, complicated and sometimes unpleasant real- ities of politics and economics (76). This form of "knowledge control" she called "defensive simplification" (1983, 128). Teachers use this strategy to circumvent what they perceive to be a lack of strong student interest or the weakness of student abilities. Rather than rely- ing on that old standard, "motivation" the teachers will win the students' compliance on a lesson by promising that it will not be difficult and will not go into any depth (1983, 128-129). Another form of knowledge control exercised by teachers was fragmentation. The material was extremely fragmented, almost always presented as lists, occasionally organized in outline form, making the disparate pieces difficult to piece together. The manner of testing, answering with short answers or filling in blanks, made piecing the fragments together unnecessary for success in the course (1986, 105). The problem with a list of fragments is that information is reduced to "'facts', as though each term in the list represents a consensus among historians or the general public about an event, a personage or an issue" (McNeil 1983, 123). What appears as non-controversial has simply had the "issue-ness" removed "by collapsing contradictory opinions into a single enumeration of fragments of the story." Lists introduced as memory aids become the study of the topic themselves. McNeil (1983) found two other forms of knowledge control, those of omission and mysti- fication. The omission of most concern to students was 122 teachers' truncating treatment of the recent past. McNeil observed that fuller treatment was often given to periods experienced not by students but by teachers themselves. Especially at the first school observed, where the course was titled 'Contemporary United States His- tory', each teacher crammed the most recent twenty years, of the fifty or so to be covered by the course, into the last three to eight days of the semester (1983, 126). This practice she attributed to teachers' feeling more comfortable with events they had experienced rather than those more recent. Mystification referred to the practice of teachers who "often tried to surround a controversial or complex topic with mystery in order to close off discussion of it" (125). Examples were the Federal Reserve, the gold standard, and the International Monetary Fund. Although these four forms of knowledge control--fragmentation, defensive simplification, omission, and mystification-- were exercised by teachers, similar forms of knowledge control have been found in textbooks. What appears as censorship or indoctrination in textbooks may mirror a pedagogy that avoids complexity and synthesis in the interests of classroom management and administrative efficiency. Apple and Weis (1983) found this pedagogy to promote a "technicist" ideology whose goal is "the pos- sessive individual" (Apple 1983b, 156-157). The 123 possessive individual seeks to accumulate skills for "status attainment" and not to participate in social dis- course. In the studies of McNeil and Apple, a null curriculum is traced to forces of knowledge control. In 1901 Edward A. Ross published Social Control: A SUrvey of the Feundations of Order in which he showed how education contributed to social progress and to social stability. He distinguished between class control, which referred to the leadership of a self-styled elite that ended in social cleavage, and social control, which resulted in stability that promoted egalitarian mobility. The means of class control were force, fraud, and super- stition; those of social control, persuasion and teaching (Cremin 1988, 397-398). These distinctions were blurred by radical revisionist historians of the 19403 who held that education in the hands of liberal reformers "was an instrument for maintaining the status quo and ration- alizing an illiberal social order" (Tanner and Tanner 1980, 433). The confusion between social and class control continues: "Unfortunately, Ross's analysis of the two-pronged aspect of social control was miscast by Krug and recent curriculum historians in the traditional suppressive vein that Ross had so vigorously attacked" (Tanner and Tanner 1990, 360). Contemporary researchers such as Anyon (1978) have found social studies education to exert social control by 124 causing students to internalize institutional norms and to "legitimize" society's political and economic order. McNeil (1986), in a study of social studies classrooms, argued that schools "transform" culture. They take that culture and transform it into pieces of knowledge and units of courses and sequen- ces of assignments that are compatible with the internal bureaucratic processes of the school. After being processed through worksheets, list-filled lec- tures and short-answer tests, the cultural content, regardless of whose interests it may have served before, comes to serve only the interests of institutional efficiencies. Its forms may have some utility but its substance has been depleted. Its meaning is whatever meaning the assignments have in helping students meet the institutional requirements of their credentialing (13). For example, some teachers in McNeil's study taught "defensively" by diluting course content to palliate administrators, raising test scores and passing students by writing only multiple choice or true/false tests on historical facts. This "negotiation of efficiencies" traded knowledge access for social control (160). Other teachers reduced student reading and writing requirements and substituted videotapes to maintain classroom disci- pline; this McNeil called "participatory deskilling." Deskilling means diminishing the level of student or teacher skills (Apple 1983a). Paired with deskilling was "reskilling" in which "technicist ideologies" and "tech- nical rules and procedures" substituted for former high- level skills (Apple and Weis 1983, 6); "reskilling involves the substitution of the skills and ideological 125 visions of management" (Apple 1983b, 149). Both deskil- ling and reskilling are forms of control that trade reduced subject demands for administrative efficiency or student acquiescence. Much of the student apathy, and even occasional resistance, which administrators see as a motivation problem requiring more discipline procedures arises in these schools precisely because goals of order have already undermined the ability of staff to deal with educative goals (161). Even the assumptions of educational researchers, McNeil found, were unexamined and disregarded "the inter- relation of instructional process and instructional con- tent." In addition, they failed to consider "that pro- ducing 'effects' in terms of student learning or achieve- ments might not be a primary goal of the classroom inter- action. There was no analytical category for what might be left out of the information exchange" (162). In other words, research methods that patterned themselves on the "achievement tradition" condoned the null curriculum (Apple and Weis 1983, 3). These research practices also reflect the inade- quacy of what McNeil argued were the "dominant models of curriculum theory - management and cultural reproduction - [which] see the student as too passive, too acted upon." She found "that there is no interactive model for seeing whether the student is, in fact, resisting the processing of the school" (164). Not only do these 126 practices deskill the student but also "deskill the role of the student. They are separating the organic processes of learning from the process of institutional exchange" (208). Some of these practices may be respon- sible for fragmenting subjects and, in history courses, would be ahistorical to the degree they undermine the coherence of history and trivialize its content. By examining instructional materials, Apple (1988) found a good deal of the newer curriculum models and materials not in use also tend reduce the actual content down to atomistic units. Their effects on teaching as a labor process and on curricular quality are profound, often resulting in the deskilling of teaching and a neglect of all but the most surface and reductive knowledge to be studied (112). The tendency to look outside of one's own or one's colleagues' historical experience about curriculum and teaching is lessened as considerably more of the curriculum, and the teaching and evaluative practices that surround it, is viewed as something one purchases. In the process - and this is very important - the school itself is transformed into a lucrative market (163). Textbooks reflect the processes of school in their division into as many chapters as there are weeks in a term, and in such aids as tests and discussion questions. Lorimer (1986) found textbook publishers "elaborate a need in such a way that only their product is capable of satisfying it" (132). He showed how textbooks have assumed the job of teaching reading. In spite of the fact that children can learn to read without the benefit of "purpose built" materials, the needs of children have been elaborated and redefined by professionals and businesses to such an extent 127 that few consider it appropriate for children to learn to read by using material not specially designed for that purpose. In other words, the acquisition of literacy skills has been commoditized (132). Other critics, having noted the generic content of some textbooks, have attributed it to a marketing strategy. Multinational publishers "must create a product that will pass as culturally significant knowledge in diverse social contexts. . . . The result is a watering down of the content for marketing purposes" (deCastell and Luke 1986, 104). Textbooks, in Apple's view, thus became "one aspect of the system of control" (74). The bureaucratic process of producing textbooks is reflected in their structure. Formats do not markedly differ from discipline to discipline. . . . the focus is primarily on producing a limited number of large sellers at a comparatively high price compared to fiction. Lastly, the emphasis is often on marketing a text with a standard content, which, with revisions and a little bit of luck, will be used for years to come (95). Lorimer did not pin responsibility for the "control processes" of textbooks solely on publishers but also on educators. Some curricular systems include "behaviorally defined competencies and objective, multiple worksheets on skills which the students were to complete, with pre-tests to measure 'readiness' and 'skill level' and post-tests to measure 'achievement" (Apple 1988, 43). To purchase such systems is "a rational management decision within industrial logic, and given its imprimatur of 128 science and efficiency, the material itself seemed rational" (36). Raymond Callahan (1962) called this managerial approach "the cult of efficiency." The rationalization of curriculum materials, according to Apple, paralleled the efficiency trend in educational administration. Given the phenomenon of training teachers in what Apple called "the ideology of professionalism" (45), or what FitzGerald called "the success of the educationists in divorcing the teachers college from the rest of the university" (1980, 213), teachers would be unlikely to read textbooks as literature. In a 1989 study of text- book preferences, Crismore found that students and parents seemed "more in agreement about criteria than students and teachers" and that "teachers and admin- istrators seemed to agree closely" (137). The criteria of students and parents showed that affective aspects were as important as cognitive ones, "and that psycho- logical, social and rhetorical factors should be balanced with factual content and skills factors." In short, students and parents seemed to view the ideal textbook as "a literary work of art." Teachers and administrators, contrastingly, seemed to see the textbook "as a non- literary piece of informative prose" and appeared far less concerned than parents and students with "inter- estingness, style or feelings and attitudes." Their 129 approach seemed "more objective, scientific and analytical" (137). Socialization or political socialization has been considered an important function of social studies education (Ehman 1969, 1980). Stake and Easley (1978) found socialization was not foisted on unwilling teachers by textbook authors and publishers but was accepted by them. The type of socialization promoted, however, may vary depending on whether practitioners or professors interpret the need. Shaver (1979) saw social studies curriculum bifurcated by the tendencies of two mindsets, that of practitioners and that of the social studies "intelligensia" whom he identified as curriculum developers and university professors. The mindset of teachers could be characterized as predominantly affec- tive; that of curriculum developers and professors, as intellectual. Curriculum developers and professors tended to "reject socialization goals" and show "'leadership' bias" toward critical thinking and inquiry while teachers tended to accept "the socialization func- tion of prompting 'American values'" (Shaver 1979, 43). This division may explain the different receptions accorded textbooks by teachers, who tend to praise them, and by curriculum developers and professors, who tend to fault them (Rogers 1988). The affective concerns that promote "a positive view of American history and our 130 government" (Shaver 1979, 43) may account for some of the ahistorical elements in textbooks. The legitimizing function of both social studies and history has a powerful affective component since his- tory can echo long-standing beliefs. Democratic virtues, of course, deserve rationalization and legitimation. The Norwegian educator Hartvig Nissan described a scene in the model school attached to the Normal School in Edinburgh (1854): In English some pieces were read from the reading book. All, without exception, read well, some remarkably finely. Thus, there was a lively thirteen-year-old boy, who had to read a short rhetorical piece, whose opening was: 'Liberty is commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; British law proclaims even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Eman- cipation!' He read with absolute certainty, with strong and true intonation and with an expression which deep and noble British self-esteem proclaimed itself, and he carried away all the people who were present to such an extent that an involuntary burst of applause broke out. The reader may feel reserve perhaps because this does not tally with our point of view; but when one is oneself present, it seems quite natural. One is oneself gripped by the same feeling and one is not offended that the feeling is allowed expression. And even looked at in the light of reflection such a scene has its deep meaning. Here the common school shows its power to implant a feeling for freedom and nationality in its pupils' breasts; the love of fatherland is strengthened and nourished by the power of sympathy, and when thus the simplest working man's son in the common school and through the use of the materials of instruction prescribed for him is in a position to strike the finest heartstrings of his superiors and carry them with him in the stream of emotion, then one gets not only the understanding but the feeling too that the people are one and that the training even if different in grade 131 yet is similar and common for all parts of the people (144-145). The pivotal phrase, "but when one is oneself present," implies that the observer has witnessed something more than ethnocentrism. The depth of feeling that words set reverberating reveals a depth of meaning that is directly related to memory. When the passionate beliefs of one's predecessors, however transmogrified or "modified in the guts of the living," (Auden) become one's own, history comes to life. "American history is to the people of the United States what memory is to an individual; with no knowledge of their past they would suffer from collective amnesia, groping blindly into the future without guide- posts of precedence to shape their course" (Billington 1959, 169). Patriotism and nationalism were persistent elements in United States history textbooks as well as in those of most other nations (Curti 1946; FitzGerald 1979; White 1988). Gilbert (1955) studied the treatment of post- Civil War foreign affairs in junior high U.S. history textbooks. Jurors counted the number of lines that fell under various categories. Gilbert called one category emotional narrative that included "two distinct and rather complex classes: colorful narrative and ethical judgments" (7). He found a trend "towards a smaller proportion of emotional narrative that has developed 132 during the first fifty years of the twentieth century" (216). One-third of the foreign affairs lines examined were found to contain emotional qualities. The three major wars since 1898 accounted for almost half of this figure. Books published during 1909-1913 contained the largest proportion of emotional lines on foreign affairs (224). Although Gilbert found a "steady downward trend in the proportion in the period from 1925 to 1939, it was reversed in the Cold War period from 1947 to 1951. FitzGerald's (1980) witty summary of 19703 U.S. history textbooks seemed to indicate the persistence of emotional narrative; their message was "rather confusing: love everyone in the elementary grades, fight Communism in junior high, and face endless intractable problems in high school" (143). Butts (1988) saw a shift in the conception of citizenship education. In the social sciences over the past few decades an empirical, scientific, and behavioral view of citizenship has dominated much of the thinking of political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. They have withdrawn from the classical "high" ideal of citizenship, finding it irrelevant and unattainable in modern society. They have abandoned the normative objectives and commitments of the classical ideal in favor of realistic descriptions of political behavior (71). Fedyck (1980) studied conceptions of citizenship and nationality in U.S. history textbooks from 1913 to 1980. Citizenship she defined as "that body of knowledge, set 133 of values, and behavioral orientations necessary for the sustenance and well-being of the community" (23). Citizenship in Fedyck's view had two dimensions: legal membership in a particular community and an emotional tie of allegiance which binds the individual to the political community and its symbols. Allegiance was distinguished from patriotism in that allegiance can be pledged to an individual as well as to a larger community; whereas, patriotism "is closely identified with the development of the modern nation state and indicates attachment to a political entity" (19). In high school U.S. history textbooks Fedyck found "representative exemplars" and actual historical figures conveyed messages of citizenship. Representative exem- plars included the Pioneer, the Captain of Industry, the Immigrant, the Black, the Woman, and the Reformer. These appeared almost as personifications of democratic qualities, as prototypic, but not actual historical figures. Fedyck's method of analysis required interpretation because democratic qualities, she found, were embedded: The underlying textbook message calls for all Blacks to draw upon traditional qualities of "good" citizenship and Americanism, such as restraint, moderation, patience, perseverance, optimism, faith, compassion, strength, and intelligence. Thus even the modern textbooks' Black exemplar continues to feature that recurring cluster of traits long associated with American citizenship and nationality (148). 134 These representative exemplars collectively affirmed "the existence of an American national charac- ter" (303). It was "neither a fixed reality nor an immutable ideal, but rather a fluid and malleable iden- tity evolving over time" (310). Until the notion of cul- tural pluralism became prevalent in textbooks, they indi- cated both implicitly and explicitly "that it is the immigrant who must accommodate himself to the prevailing American culture, and not the other way around" (313). Textbooks came to embrace cultural pluralism until membership in an ethnic group became "the fundamental basis for one's relationship to the economic, political, and social order" (319). In the 19703 the idea of a "plurality" of peoples replaced that of one American nationality (320). Of specific historical figures in U.S. history text- books, Fedyck found American presidents to be the most common, especially, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, although Woodrow Wilson was often portrayed as having a surfeit of idealism. In addition to each of these presidents being characterized as an individual exemplar of good citi- zenship and Americanism, together they shared "enough qualities to form a unitary model of considerable influence" (163-164). Fedyck found the roles of both actual historical figures and representative exemplars to 135 have declined in recent years. "In a medium which has not been noted (barring several books in the teens, twenties, and thirties) for its portrayal of complex human personalities, the part played by the historical actor has recently fallen to an alltime low" (330-331). In the seventies the pioneer's portrait all but disap- peared, while the Immigrant was raised to a "leading role" (333). The Black, the woman, and other groups like the American Indian and the Hispanic "are additional exceptions to the general decline of textbook exemplars" (334). Fedyck noticed one anomaly: "while the role of exemplars generally declines in the body of the narra- tive, it is often the spotlight of attention in the question and activity sections" (335). In addition, she found that inquiry methods' concentration upon a select number of specific issues hinders the reader from developing a sense of historical continu- ity. . . . Consequently, inquiry schoolbooks fail to generate an appreciation for the nation's steady movement toward a more comprehensive definition of citizenship" (336). The treatment of citizenship behavior in textbooks during wartime was found to change, especially during the Vietnam Conflict "when the customary textbook prescrip- tions for wartime "'good' citizenship conduct no longer seem tenable" (338). Nevertheless, since "narratives have always left room for moral and ethical choices in their prescriptions for 'good' citizenship behavior" 136 (340), this treatment still fit within the citizenship framework. Textbook treatment of world citizenship qualities even paralleled and complemented "conventional modes of 'good' citizenship and 'typically' American behavior" (284). Throughout the period studied, Fedyck found that textbooks "agree that by far the most important of unify- ing sources are political in nature" (286). Unifying themes included the experience of self-government, mutual defense, and independence from European affairs. All accounts recognized "the existence of an American nation- ality and culture," (344) but ones in the seventies con- tained "increasingly rascist overtones" (349). "Against this backdrop of relatively stable treatment range [sic] a number of historical interpretations which charge the normally dreary schoolbook pages with such highly politi- cized and emotion-laden terms as 'ethnicity', 'identity', 'pluralism', 'separatism', 'melting pot', and ' Power' (fill in Black, Red, Brown or Yellow)" (346-347). She found these interpretations potentially divisive: "In short, at what point is ethnic diversity incompatible with an American nationality?" (352). The tendency of these interpretations was to "splinter the notion of a single people with a unique culture" (355). The conceptions of American citizenship and nation- ality remained "surprisingly stable in examined accounts 137 over the sixty-four year period of time" (357). Although changes occurred, "a substantial and enduring body of historical construction undergirds, overbalances, and at times eclipses the changes which do occur" (358). Both qualities, citizenship and nationality, she found, were "closely related and consequently difficult to distin- guish from each other" (358). Several reasons explained this indefiniteness: textbooks described a chiefly political version of the past; they depicted citizenship as "vague, confusing and amorphous" concepts (359); and they created "an ideal representation of the 'good' citi- zen and the 'typical' American" (360). Despite the ambiguity, she found the school history textbook to represent "one of the most widespread means of unifying the American people. Its pages . . . comprise the memory of a nation. . . . In short, it is one way of transmit- ting from one age to the next a shared sense of the past" (292-293). The way to inculcate a sense of the past was not to encumber youthful readers with "wearisome lists of positive attributes" but with new exemplars "which speak more directly to the concerns of contemporary youth" (371) and with writing that recaptures "the individuality expressed by many of the books of the teens and the twenties" (372). Further, she pointed to the need for a "conscious textbook philosophy" so that writers, editors, 138 and publishers would have "a complete, coherent, and agreed upon system of principles to help them shape a better textbook. . . . Otherwise, history textbooks will continue to flounder on an everchanging sea of public opinion, buffeted by fickle educational fads" (374). Both Ward (1980) and FitzGerald attempted to artic- ulate an implicit philosophy in history textbooks. Des- pite history's place in social studies and citizenship education, history is not a "function of civics" (Fitz- Gerald 1979, 58). The direct teaching of citizenship in the history textbook has much the same pitfalls, after all, as the direct teaching of morals in the home.' It is no wonder that by all reports history has long been, and is, the least popular subject in American high schools. The promise conveyed directly or indirectly by history textbooks and educationists that they can teach citizenship, without mention of the pitfalls, plays up to parents where they are most vulnerable. It is a sign of weakness, not strength (Ward 1980, 368). Ward called attention to the attacks on Rugg's textbooks for their social realism and "earnest emphasis on the economic inequalities dividing the U.S.," as well as to the textbook silences which followed them. He also noted the "shallowness of their [history textbooks'] combined response to the post-Sputnik infusion of funds and academic energy" in the 19603 and 19703 (368). Besides having to moderate political and, especially, economic conflict, publishers had to appease what represented "the 139 real divisions in American society . . . among those groups one might call progressives, fundamentalists, and mandarins" (FitzGerald 1980, 198). These groups, respec- tively, represent constituencies for an ameliorative ideology, for patriotism, and for scholarship. Both progressivists and fundamentalists, in FitzGerald's view, tended to assume that schools must manipulate student minds. These two mindsets presented "the world or the country as an ideal construct, whether as the utopia of the fundamentalists or as the utopia of the progressives" (Ward 1980, 368). Whichever mindset was the case, the United States extended its influence. Cremin traced the metropolitan character of the United States in the twentieth century. . . . one characteristic of a metropolis is that its ideas and products carry a mark of superiority, they tend to command attention and become dominant. As the United States became a metropolitan civilization during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its ideas and products began to exercise hegemony in far places, to the delight of some and the dismay of others (1988, 675). Marxist critics have objected to a hegemonic quality in textbooks that stifles dissenting and alternative views. Although each textbook, like weekly newsmagazines, can almost be fixed at a certain position on the conserva- tive-liberal political spectrum, most deviations are slight so that mainstream markets will not be sacrificed. One contemporary curriculum effort promises to 140 revamp the discipline-centered orientation that rein- forces "the great fragmentation, imbalance, congestion, and isolation of studies . . . along with the neglect of the life of the learner and the life of society" (Tanner 1990, 196). The Science/Technology/Society (STS) move- ment is the forerunner of Project 2061, Science for all Americans, that integrates science, mathematics, tech- nology, and society "in order to address common problems such as human population, world food supply, energy, the living environment, physical and mental health, social change and conflict, and so on--with teaching being con- sistent with the nature of scientific inquiry" (196). It remains to be seen whether the effects of the STS frame- work will be ahistorical. A recent discipline-centered social studies curric- ulum is the California "History-Social Science Framework" which restores history to the center of the social studies and significantly increases the time allocated to chronological history (California State Department of Education 1987, 29). To resolve the problem of redun- dancy in the teaching of U.S. history so frequently criticized at the secondary level, the framework reserves the study of the World War I-to-present period for the high school. It also stresses the importance of reading literature and in its criteria for evaluating instructional materials prescribes "vivid and dramatic writing without 141 sacrificing accuracy" and accurate and truthful presentation of controversies (115). The ultimate test of any textbook or instruc- tional material is its power to engage the imagina- tion of the reader. No matter how graphically the textbooks are illustrated, no matter how many experts are hired to certify their validity, and no matter how many claims are made on their behalf as conveyers of skills and concepts, the textbooks will fail unless they excite the enthusiasm of the students who read them (118). A line of thought similar to that which produced California's history-social science framework is that of the Bradley Commission which advocates "historical literacy" (Gagnon 1990). The problem with advocates for the various literacies is that, like advocates of issue- oriented politics, they opine separately. In the multitude of literacies the curriculum becomes further fragmented as each literacy fights for its rightful priority in the curriculum. Hence we find leading advocates of "cultural literacy" ignoring or even denigrating natural science. "All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies outside natural sciences," declares Allan Bloom (1987, 356) in his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (Tanner 1990, 196-197). The report of the Curriculum Task Force of the National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools sug- gested "the recent and future course of our nation will be fully understood only in the rich context of world history in its political, cultural and social complexity" (1989, x). The report recommended combining secondary level U.S. geography and history with world geography and history. It could be argued that FitzGerald's verdict-- 142 "that not only traditional textbook approaches but national histories per se have become in many ways outdated" (1980, 144)--ten years later, won enough agree- ment to warrant the report's prescription. FitzGerald (1980) found the reforms proposed by progressive, fundamentalist, and mandarin movements all "contributed to the reductive view of history and the ahistoricism and the dullness that inhabit so many of the history texts" (210). The proposals of these three groups in the seventies were further confused by a fourth, the social studies professionals, who took it upon themselves "to translate its general ideas into more specific and trivial ones and to make even the simplest issue incomprehensible" (210). The reformers failed to regard Bertrand Russell's (1932) admonition that "the whole conception of truth is one which is difficult to reconcile with the usual ideals of citizenship," (23) if only because "it is impossible to instill the scientific spirit into the young so long as any propositions are regarded as sacrosanct and not open to question" (105). The reforms were followed by the Back to Basics movement which, as FitzGerald reminded, "often coincides with the ends of wars and with periods of economic downturn. . . . it always seems to appear in the wake of efforts to democratize the school system" (1980, 207). Jackson (1983) likened trends in curriculum to two 143 perpendicular axes, the vertical representing "excellence and heightened achievement"; the horizontal, "toward equity and social justice" (144). Most federal efforts, in Jackson's view, stretched along the horizontal axis, although the National Science Foundation educational reforms of the seventies were closer to the vertical. Jackson observed that both the curriculum makers and the National Science Foundation were caught off guard by the attacks and resistance the reforms produced, "symptomatic of a deep and fundamental uneasiness about whether curriculum development is the business of the federal government at all" (154). He found that by "neglecting to consider how widespread the problem of inadequate instruction and a weak curriculum might be, the advocates of more and better science and math run the risk of cutting themselves off from the much needed support of what could become a veritable army of allies" (161). Although the need for educational reform has been widely touted, even by presidents, the absence of federal initiative in the eighties demonstrates nothing if not that Horace Mann's idea of local control of the schools has regained strength. Given the faddism of past reform efforts, the inertial power of the complex system of textbook development and adoption, perhaps wisely, like the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution, impedes fundamental change. Although state governors have 144 recently introduced educational reforms, the tendency of local control has been to resist curriculum change. As in the case of California's refusal to endorse biology textbooks that contained creationism, the system has been shown to be manipulable, at least for the textbooks of one large state. Yet the system remains intact. Only the development of new technology threatens to displace the American tradition of curriculum-by-textbook. Summary This chapter has examined a variety of factors that may have influenced ahistoric and fragmented elements in United States history textbooks. It has also reviewed several studies of textbooks with a view toward framing methods of investigating fragmentation and ahistoricism. The heavy reliance American schooling has placed on text- books, in part because of the local control of schools and the lack of national consensus on what constitutes United States history curriculum, is partly responsible for publishers' attempting to make textbooks be all things to all people. A swollen textbook is the visible sign of including too much, and indiscriminate stuffing in the interests of coverage and tokenism has been seen as a cause of fragmentation. The "professional fallacy" (Boorstin 1989, 222), or specialization of history, has affected the field of 145 history to the point where it now has only a peripheral relation with schooling. This removal has contributed to the presence of ahistoricism. History also has been divided by the approaches of narrative and new social history, resulting in a confusion of themes and a lack of synthesis. The social history approach is also charac- terized by an expository, and not a narrative, writing style. The removal of metadiscourse from the prose of textbook writers has led to a flat, arid style that does not engage a reader. In their reliance on the measur- able, some state and local education agencies, as well as educational researchers, have focused on process to the point of slighting content, without which no sense of history can emerge. The appeasement of interest groups by publishers has diffused the focus of U.S. history so that common elements often have been sacrificed to represent diver- sity. The training of teachers and administrators appears to indicate insufficient attention has been drawn to recognizing literary quality in textbooks; educators at the building level equate a textbook with a work of reference. The vast scope and inchoate nature of social studies make textbook content selection difficult. The citizenship education tradition itself in the social studies may be seen as an ahistorical influence on content selection. An overreliance on the findings of 146 developmental psychology has hindered empirical inves- tigation of what children can learn about historical subjects. The more tangible consequences of science, when set next to those of history, tend to diminish his- tory's importance in industrial societies, making its study less attractive to students. 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Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1986. Williams, Raymond. 1975. Television: Technology and cultural form. New York: Schocken Books. . 1976. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press. CHAPTER III METHOD W The parent population consists of all United States history textbooks used in Michigan public school class- rooms in the 19803. The sample population was selected by means of three separate surveys conducted by the Michigan Department of Education to determine the most frequently used United States history textbooks. The Department periodically reviews textbooks for bias as required by Michigan law. Eighth-grade textbooks were chosen for the 1982-83 study; textbooks for grades five and six, for the 1988 study; and grades, ten and eleven, for the 1989 study. Because textbooks in Michigan are selected at the district level, approximately one hundred schools in as many districts were chosen for each survey. Selection among the six-hundred districts was stratified to ensure representative demographic distribution. Each survey had a response rate of eighty percent or greater. Five to ten of the most frequently used textbooks were selected by the Department's Social Studies/International Education Specialist for each grade level. 160 161 Although these textbooks were in use in the 19803, one of them bears a copyright date from the 19703; however, for the Department's review, the most recent editions were obtained. Since as much as seven years separated this study from the Department of Education studies, this author obtained only those textbooks still in print and in the most recent editions. The five elementary textbooks are: America and Its Neighbors (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986); The United States: Its History and Neighbors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1988); The United States: Yesterday and Today (Silver Burdett & Ginn, Inc. 1988); America: Yesterday and Today (Scott Foresman and Co. 1988); Living in Our country (Laidlaw Brothers Publishers 1985). The four middle school textbooks are: America's Story (Houghton-Mifflin Company 1988); Two Centuries of Progress (Laidlaw Brothers Publishers 1977); The Free and the Brave (Rand, McNally and Company 1980); America! America! (Scott, Foresman and Co. 1987). The five high school textbooks are: The United States: A History of the Republic (Prentice Hall 1988); The Triumph of the American Nation (Harcourt Brace Jovan- ovich 1986); A History of the United States Since 1861 (Prentice Hall 1990); History of the American People (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986); The American People: 162 A History from 1877 (McDougal, Littell 1989). 219229922 The entirety of textbooks will be examined for excessive ahistoricism; sample passages, for fragmen- tation. Only the history, and not the geography portion, of elementary textbooks will be examined. Content anal- ysis will begin with a brief narrative of each textbook's scope and organization because the findings cannot be considered apart from them. Textbook organization usually follows periodization, physical location, or political, economic, military, diplomatic, cultural, social, intellectual, and biographical structures (Lowe 1969, 62). Most textbooks combine both chronological and broad topical structures, usually by arranging units chronologically within which chapters are organized topically. The means of selection employed by a publisher also contributes to a book's organization. Some figures and events appear for their historical significance, others for purposes of representation (Bender 1990); thus, sample selection should include various topics. Shaver, Davis, and Helburn (1980) found social studies textbook content, especially at the middle and high school levels, tended to correspond with curriculum content. Although Ravitch (1987) found the social 163 studies to constitute a "national curriculum," Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll (1989) found wide variation in commercial social studies programs. As part of their study, Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll examined fifth grade United States history textbooks by four publishers and found two "devote almost half their texts to U.S. geog- raphy" while the other two "devote their full texts to U.S. history" (106). Two of the programs, therefore, had half the United States history coverage of the other two. Unit of Analysis The "content-mediated" procedure of Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll (1989) will be used to determine the length of passages for analysis of fragmentation. To analyze a section of text, we first detemined the goal of a unit of content, which could range from a paragraph to a chapter in length. The determination of a goal involved either what the goal appeared to be on reading the text or a goal that would be reasonably expected for the topic being presented. The text was then evaluated as to whether the goal was likely to be met for target-age readers (112). When a content goal was not explicit, Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll relied on a work by a professional historian to determine "a goal that would be reasonably expected." This study will follow the same practice. Ahistoricism The written portion of all textbooks will be examined for the presence of ahistorical elements which 164 appear as anomalies. For earlier textbooks, types of ahistoricism included perfectionism, anachronism, presentism, and omission (FitzGerald 1980). It is difficult for a textbook for fifth graders to present a reliable and significant account without endorsing the view that there can be only one right account, whether it is a conventional interpretation or one out of contemporary research. Some few of these textbooks avoid this over-certainty and rigidity by relying on such devices as recounting strengths and weaknesses in some matter and the points of view of more than one group of people (Fair 1989, 22). A textbook passage that recounts "strengths and weak- nesses in some matter and the points of view of more than one group of people" can, unfortunately, cause a reader to mistake an explanation for a judgment. If the infor- mation furnished is incomplete, it may be insufficient for a reader's own decision-making. Explanations without judgments may not be as objectionable as judgments without explanations. If the judgment only followed the explanation, the reader could simply skip it. Unfortunately the habit of passing judgments leads to a loss of taste for explanations. When the passions of the past blend with the prejudices of the present, human reality is reduced to a picture in black and white (Bloch 1953, 140). Fair (1989) found that fifth grade United States history textbooks, generally speaking, "handle the controversies and conflicts of the past more forthrightly than those of the present" (22). 165 Fragmentation To examine fragmentation, passages from four topics will be selected: events leading to the Civil War, cowboys, Abraham Lincoln, and the civil rights movement. The events leading to the Civil War topic was chosen to illustrate a chain of events; that of cowboys, because of its significance in popular imagination, and its anonymous nature as a mythic vocation and as social history. Abraham Lincoln was chosen for his symbolizing the myth that any citizen can become president and because most textbooks fail "to provide a substantial biographical sketch" of him (Gagnon 1989, 69). Since critics (Glazer and Ueda 1983; Bender 1989) have found that the interests of representation sometimes override those of historical significance, the civil rights movement was chosen. At least two textbooks will be selected for analysis of each topic on the basis of reviewer comments from the Michigan Department of Education studies. Where possible, one textbook determined to be fragmented by either the reviewer for educational soundness or the reviewer for readability will be selected; if a textbook was deter- mined not to be fragmented, it will be selected as the second textbook. Comparisons will be drawn both within and across levels. First, the elements or events that are to represent a chain will be identified; then the passage examined for 166 whether it establishes a "context for facts" (Bradley Commission 1988). Content analysis will follow the structural method as outlined by Gilbert (1989; Figure 1) and as practiced by researchers such as Dance (1960), Anyon (1979), Larkins, Hawkins, and Gilmore (1987), and Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll (1989). Analysis of sequential text presentations allowed us to consider the learning that may develop as students move through a sequence. This approach also enables us to communicate a sense of the raw material from which young students are to build a representation of a topic (Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll 1989, 108). Individuals' unlimited wants and unique preferences Market Economic mechanism system of Equilibrium (specialization, + division of .p and satisfaction exchange, and labour and of community's substitution at distribution needs the margin) of rewards Individuals' abilities Figure 1: The Economic Images of Human Nature and Soci- ety (From Rob Gilbert. 1989. Text analysis and ideology critique of curricular content. In Language, authority and criticism, ed. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke, 66. London, New York and Philadelphia: Falmer Press.) 167 1121291119523 The following hypotheses are based on the research questions in Chapter I and the findings of researchers in Chapter II. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Textbooks contain excessive ahistorical elements. Ahistoricism can be categorized into types. The types of ahistoricism can be characterized. The types of ahistoricism vary by grade level. The presence of ahistorical elements can be explained by certain factors. The frequency of types of ahistoricism can be deter- mined. Ahistorical elements will be more frequent in elementary textbooks. The content of textbooks is excessively fragmented. The content of fragmented textbooks can be categorized. The types of fragmentation can be characterized. Certain factors explain fragmentation. The frequency of types of fragmentation can be determined. The types of fragmentation vary by grade level. Fragmentation will be more frequent in high school textbooks. Fragmentation will be more frequent for recent 168 history. 16. Textbooks reflect ahistorical approaches or ahistorical educational philosophies. 17. Some appearances of fragmentation coincide with those of ahistoricism. Wham After findings are accumulated, types of ahistor- icism and fragmentation will be determined by "trial-and- error elaboration of categories" (Hobson 1988, 259). Types of fragmentation include an absence of themes, confused or discontinuous themes, superficial treatment of subjects, and the failure to identify actors (FitzGerald 1980). Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll (1989) identified useless comparisons, variations too soon, causes without consequences (114-117), unanchored places (123), inappropriate assumption of background knowledge (140-141), inappropriate simplification of complex issues (144-145), the absence of examples and nonexamples, unclear relationships (147), lack of elab- oration (148), inadequate explanation, and unclear con- tent goals (151). The frequencies of ahistoricism and fragmentation will be estimated. Findings will be compared with those of FitzGerald (1980), and specula- tions made about the influences responsible for them. Since textual coherence also depends on literary style, 169 some comments about style will be made. WORKS CITED Anyon, Jean. 1979. Ideology and United States history textbooks. Harvard Educational Review 49, 3: 361- 86. Beck, Isabel L., Margaret G. McKeown, Erika W. Gromoll. 1989. Learning from social studies texts. Cognition and Instruction 6, 2: 99-158. Bender, Thomas. 1989. Public culture: Inclusion and synthesis in American history. In Historical literacy: The case for history in American educa- tion, ed. Paul Gagnon and The Bradley Commission on History in Schools, 188-202. New York: Macmillan. Bloch, Marc. 1953. The historian's craft. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House. Bradley Commission on History in Schools. 1989. History teaching examined. Quoted in Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Erika W. Gromoll. Learning from social studies texts. COgnition and Instruction 6, 2: 135. Dance, E. H. 1960. History the betrayer: A study in bias. London: Hutchinson and Co. Fair, Jean. 1989. Scholarship and religion. In Michigan social studies textbook study (1988): A review and evaluation of selected middle school textbooks (grades 5-6), , 19-22. Lansing: Michigan State Board of Education. FitzGerald, Frances. 1980. America Revised: History schoolbooks in the twentieth century. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House; first published Atlantic-Little Brown, 1979. Gagnon, Paul. 1989. Democracy's half-told story: What American history textbooks should add. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers. 170 171 Gilbert, Rob. 1989. Text analysis and ideology critique of curricular content. In Language, authority and criticism, ed. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke, 66. London, New York and Philadelphia: Falmer Press. Glazer, Nathan and Reed Ueda. 1983. Ethnic groups in history textbooks. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center. ERIC, ED 232 941. Hobson, J. Allan. 1988. The dreaming brain. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Larkins, A. Guy, Michael L. Hawkins, and Allison Gilmore. 1987. Trivial and noninformative content of elementary social studies: A review of primary texts in four series. Theory and Research in Social Education XV, 4 (fall): 299-311. Lowe, William T. 1969. Structure and the social sciences. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ravitch, Diane. 1987. Tot sociology. The American Scholar 56 (summer): 343-354. Shaver, James P., O.L. Davis, Jr., and Suzanne W. Helburn. 1980. An interpretive report on the status of precollege social studies education based on three NSF-funded studies. What are the needs in precollege science, mathematics, and social studies education? Views from the field. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. ERIC, ED 193 051. Cited in Isabel L.Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Erika W. Gromoll. Learning from social studies texts, 102. Cognition and Instruction 6, 2, 1989. CHAPTER IV FINDINGS Introduction This study examines fourteen U.S. history text- books of the 19803 for ahistoricism and fragmentation. The previous chapter explained the methods of content analysis. This chapter begins with a brief overview of each textbook's organization, sets forth the findings and compares them to the hypotheses. Elementary Textbooks The United States history portion of America: Yesterday and Today (Scott, Foresman 1988) encompasses 323 pages; the rest is devoted to geography, and Latin American and Canadian history. The disadvantage in sep- arating geography and history is that regional geography is not linked to regional history. Three kinds of insets besides maps and charts are featured: historical sites that can be visited, biographies, and geography's rela- tionships with history. The United States: Yesterday and Today (Silver Burdett and Ginn 1988) devotes 224 pages to geography and 310 pages to history. Insets include Special Interest 172 173 Features (on persons, places, and other topics) and Using Skills. In The United States: Its History and Neighbors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988), United States history takes up 450 pages; the rest comprises geography, and Canadian and Mexican history. Insets include Highlights and Skills for Success. Living in our Country (Laidlaw Brothers 1985) begins with 116 pages of geography and ends with 322 pages of United States history. America and Its Neighbors (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986) mixes both United States history and "Social Studies Skills" in 444 pages. A brief review of geography skills begins the book. Insets include Close-up on America. and Famous Americans. Middle School Textbooks America! America! (Scott, Foresman 1987) integrates some geographic information within the text, mostly in the early chapters. It has 722 pages; insets include Close Up, The Big Picture, Law in America, and Developing Skills. The Free and the Brave (Rand, McNally 1980) contains 703 pages on United States history. No insets are featured. America's Story (Houghton Mifflin 1988) begins with 174 a geographical section, then proceeds with 768 pages of history. Insets include Causes and Effects, Primary Source, Gaining Skills, Linking Past and Present, American Highlights, Our Presidents, and Cause and Effect Flow Charts. Two Centuries of Progress (Laidlaw Brothers 1977) devotes 685 pages to United States history. In each unit is a Focus chapter for in-depth study. Insets include Historical Documents, Opinions Differ, Contributions, Sports and Recreation, Social Studies Skills, and others. High School Textbooks Triumph of the American Nation (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986) devotes 998 pages to United States history, from its beginnings to the mid-19803. Insets include Americana, American Profiles, Developing History Study Skills, Sources, Decisive Moments, and This Changing Land. The United States: A History of the Republic (Prentice Hall 1988) contains 801 pages, covering from the time of discovery to the mid-19803. Insets include Skill Lessons, Writer's Handbook, and Special Features. The uncanny resemblance of this book's chapter organization to that of Triumph of the American Nation may betoken the practice of imitating bestsellers. History of the American People (Holt, Rinehart and 175 Winston 1986) contains 815 pages, begins with discovery, and ends with the mid-19803. Insets include Primary Sources and Sidenotes. A History of The United States Since 1861 (Prentice Hall 1990) devotes 732 pages to the period between 1861 and 1987. Insets include Documents and Making Connections (timelines). An "Epilogue" devotes 184 pages to histor- ical documents. The American People: A History from 1877 (McDougal, Littell 1989) contains 664 pages, beginning with the Industrial Revolution and ending with the mid-19803. Insets include Readings, Source Materials in Text, and Focus sections. A "Perspectives" chapter in each unit is devoted to geography, economics, government, and cultural history. 881.33.321.33 The entirety of each textbook is examined for ahis- toricism. Findings are organized by type, and, where possible, frequency is estimated. Fictional Representation Two elementary textbooks give anonymous historical figures fictional names or present fictional accounts. For example, in a two-page "Close-up" of pioneers, America! America! (Scott Foresman 1987), an eighth grade textbook, names anonymous persons and pairs them with 176 fictional accounts of archetypal pioneer experiences (258-259). Although the names and accounts resemble actual ones, they are ahistorical to the degree they are fictional. These names and accounts appear below period photographs, almost as if they were captions, although the text above the photographs accurately introduces the material as a "description of people who might have lived. . . ." (258). Ironically, one of the photographs is of James Beckwith, the black mountain man, who is not identified. Similarly, a fictional Norwegian family's story of settling on the Nebraska frontier is recounted and paired with a photograph (496-497). Again, the story is not atypical and is identified as imaginary but does ascribe fictional names and experiences to anonymous artifacts. Although these cases of naming the nameless and inventing archetypal accounts for middle school readers involve only four pages, they serve no narrative purpose and do not engage a reader as does, for example, Eric Sloane's Diary of an Early American Boy: NOah Blake 1805 (1962). Living in Our Country (Laidlaw 1985), a fifth grade textbook, begins every history chapter with introductory characters, all of whom appear to be fictional and most of whom have only first names. Although this "time machine" device attempts to ease a fifth-grade reader's way into an unfamiliar past--or, in educational jargon, to change a 177 reader's psychological set--it adds nonentities who are external to the narrative and are never seen again because each chapter introduces a fresh set of characters. In short, this practice tends to confuse a reader and takes up fifteen half-pages of valuable space. Only two instances of excessive fictional representation are found in the textbooks' history sections. Omission Certain passages in 19803 textbooks demonstrate a refreshing frankness to readers who recall sanitized previous editions. America! America! (Scott, Foresman 1987), an eighth grade textbook, describes the graft and speculation surrounding the Homestead Act. But most of the public land given away by the government did not go to small farmers. Millions of acres went to railroad, mining, timber, and land companies. The railroads got huge grants of land to help build their lines. Some companies got their land by illegal means. For example, some companies hired people to get land under the Homestead Act and then turn it over to them. Then, these companies turned around and sold the land to newly arrived settlers. Many settlers in the West bought their land from com- panies rather than obtain it free from the government (498). Yet, one hundred years and 200 pages later, whether through truncated treatment or withheld information, controversy is side-stepped. The reaction to the killing of the four Kent State students by National Guard troops is made a matter of opinion. "Many people were outraged at the killings. They thought the National Guard could 178 have quieted the demonstrators without resorting to the shootings" (693). Significant facts--that the students threw epithets and less-than-lethal objects at troops with little or no riot training, riot equipment, or fire discipline--are omitted. A similar failure to furnish essential information is repeated in discussion of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II: "Many Americans felt that it benefited the Soviet Union more than the United States" (704). The young reader thus is left suspended with insufficient information and a spurious objectivity that is in fact an evasion. Matters requiring careful sifting of facts and forming of judgments become, instead, an opinion poll where every opinion, however ill-informed, counts equally. Even treatment of the seemingly uncontroversial Boston Tea Party can raise questions in the mind of a reader who reads either of two middle school textbooks: Many colonists rejoiced when they heard about the Boston Tea Party. They believed it would show how strongly they objected to taxation without represen- tation. Other colonists were shocked to hear what the Bostonians had done. They did not think that destroy- ing property was the best way to solve the debate over taxes. Even Benjamin Franklin suggested that the colonists pay the British East India Company for the ruined tea. The debate over the best response to strict British laws would continue almost three more years (America's Story 1987, 146). This amount of tea would be worth over $100,000 today. The mob was cheered that night in Boston, but many other Americans later condemned the lawlessness and wastefulness of the act (America! America! 1987, 184). 179 That the Boston Tea Party was controversial at the time of its occurrence is clear; what is less clear is how the reader can form a judgment after having been confronted with two diametrically opposed arguments, the Tea Party as either a crime or a lark. Since Thoreau first gave a name to civil disobedience, introducing it as a third possi- bility would be appropriate. With this information, a reader could also consider throwing tea into Boston Harbor an act in-protest of a "bad" law as well as one revolu- tionaries staged to lower the threshold of violence. Although America: Yesterday and Today (Scott, Foresman 1988), a fifth grade textbook, bears a 1988 copyright, it omits essential information about the Nisei, the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. A reader is subjected to the "some/other" treatment: Some people thought Japan might attack the west coast. Other people felt an attack could come from inside the United States, from people of Japanese descent living on the west coast. Many of the families had members in the army or navy. Other Americans ignored these facts. They considered Japanese Americans a threat to the country. (323). The see-saw of some/other omits the fact that Nisei sur- vivors were voted $20,000 each by the United States Gov- ernment in 1983; the vote was the only official recognition of injustice until damages were paid in 1989. Neutrality is sometimes confused with objectivity. In The united States: Its History and Neighbors (Harcourt 180 Brace Jovanovich 1988), a fifth grade textbook, the story of the Cherokee Trail of Tears is written in a flat, choppy style that masks injustice. The United States had guaranteed the independence of the Cherokee nation by a treaty in 1791. When gold was discovered on Cherokee lands in 1828, Georgia began to take those lands. The Cherokees appealed for help to the national government, but their pleas went unheard. Instead of supporting the treaty with the Cherokees, Jackson used the army against them. They too were forced to move. They started westward in the winter of 1838. Almost one-fourth of their number died on the trail from disease, hunger, and cold. This journey, like others taken by Indians forced to move west, has been called the Trail of Tears (329). Though neither strictly ahistorical nor objectionable, there is nothing memorable about this passage either. After six presidents had acknowledged that the occupation of land by Indian nations meant that they owned property, nothing in this passage communicates the outrage of Jackson's unprecedented act. A blooper sentence in The Uhited States: Yesterday and Today (Silver Burdett and Ginn 1988), a fifth grade textbook, cannot be said to be an improvement: "The Cherokee Indians were one group who did not benefit from Jacksonian democracy" (196). The some/other practice is not restricted to elementary and middle school textbooks.‘ Many Americans believed that illegal aliens, by their willingness to work for lower wages, took jobs away from citizens. Many Americans feared the aliens would enter the welfare roles and raise taxes for all Americans. Still other Americans were concerned for the aliens themselves. They were unlikely to turn to the authorities for help. Thus illegal aliens were good targets for exploitation and abuse (Triumph of 181 the American Nation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986, 955). This passage constitutes its own type of omission: it says absolutely nothing. In A History of The United States Since 1861 (Prentice Hall 1990), an eleventh grade textbook, Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court receives "equal treatment:" Bork's champions defended him as a brilliant and courageous conservative. His opponents, led by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, attacked him for being insensitive to the rights of minorities and standing outside the mainstream of American social progress (538). Although Bork is characterized as "a bearded, learned, and especially outspoken conservative," a reader is never informed of his controversial opinions and, therefore, cannot determine the justice of remarks attributed to both his supporters and detractors. Avoidance of fact is apparent in a paragraph about "a young (41), wealthy, good-looking, and little-known right-wing Republican Senator from Indiana," J. Danforth Quayle. The press accused Quayle of using family influence to avoid military service in Vietnam. Many people questioned Bush's judgment in selecting such a person to stand only a heartbeat away from the White House (543). A reader is unable to ascertain either that press accus- ations were true or what elements in Quayle's background caused persons to question Bush's judgment. Opinions are 182 offered without justification. Both examples also substi- tute labels for facts: neither "a bearded, learned, and especially outspoken conservative," nor "a young (41), wealthy, good-looking, and little-known right-wing Repub- lican Senator from Indiana," says anything and, therefore, avoids controversy. False Emphasis A more subtle ahistorical tendency occurs in the treatment of recent events. Certain events are covered at greater length than ones of greater historical signifi- cance, perhaps reflecting the influence of mass media coverage. For instance, in America! America!, an eighth grade textbook, eleven lines are devoted to the Camp David accords while twenty-three lines are given to the Iran hostage-taking; America's Story, another eighth grade textbook, devotes nineteen to the former and thirty- two to the latter. Although the hostage crisis directly involved United States citizens and was crucial in the 1980 election, an agreement that ended thirty years of fighting between strategically located nations who receive support from the superpowers warrants more extended treatment. Because of its subtlety, the frequency of this type of ahistoricism is also difficult to assess. 183 Futurism Instead of the perfectionism FitzGerald noted in 19703' textbooks, some high school textbooks have replaced it with futurism (Triumph of the American Nation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986). For the most part, Native Americans remain intensely proud of their heritage. They have contributed richly to American life. They also have much more to contribute (957). Urgent though the challenges of preserving the environment are, the American people have reason to move into the future with confidence. The same scientific genius and engineering talents that unknowingly created many of the as yet unsolved problems remain available to solve them (983). An example from a fifth grade textbook similarly avows an mindless futurism, or upbeat mindlessness, but also manages to mix in fragmentation: Inventions have changed the ways we work and play. Our nation has played a greater part in world affairs. More people than ever before have a say in our government and society. Religious leaders are actively speaking out about life in the United States. Two leaders, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend "Pat" Robertson have even run for President. The New American Revolution goes on, because the people and the leaders of this country are continuing to fill the dreams of the brave men and women who have gone before us (The United States: Yesterday and Today, Silver Burdett and Ginn 1988, 356). This passage echoes the examples of progressivism gone awry FitzGerald (1980) quoted in America Revised. Conclusion The most noticeable type of ahistoricism is omis- sion, especially in coverage of recent events. The degree 184 of frequency is difficult to assess because it is not strictly bounded and has many gradations. Omission is a type of ahistoricism similar to what FitzGerald (1980) called evasion in 19703' textbooks. In one elementary and one middle school textbook, ahistoricism also takes the form of fictional representation. A more subtle form of ahistoricism was found in distorted coverage, which may be attributable to the influence of other media. The fre- quency of distorted coverage and the degree to which other media have contributed to it are difficult to assess. Finally, a fourth type of ahistoricism, futurism, is found in some textbooks. Futuristic elements are similar to those FitzGerald characterized as perfectionism in 19503 textbooks. Fragmentation Four topics are selected as sample passages: events leading to the Civil War, cowboys, Abraham Lincoln, and the civil rights movement. For each passage at least two textbooks are analyzed for the presence of fragmentation. Events Leading to the Civil War This topic is selected to examine the chain of events that characterized the rise of sectionalism and precipitated the Civil War. In The United States: Yesterday and Today (Silver Burdett and Ginn 1988), a fifth grade textbook, the unit of analysis is the first 185 third of Chapter 11 (230-238). The chapter begins with a discussion of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, comparing and contrasting their ways of life. These figures are then seen as representative of Northern and Southern sectional differences; however, the same para- graph then shifts to explaining how the three sections-- Northeast, Southeast, and West--became two in the 18403. The word sectionalism itself is not introduced until several pages later. At one point an assertion mars discussion of slavery: "The love and care that slave parents, children, brothers, sisters, and other relatives gave one another helped them pull through a rough time" (233). The sentence makes it sound as if slavery were a temporary state. Slavery is treated in general terms until the insurrection of Nat Turner is described. The parts of William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimké sisters, and Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist movement, the Quaker plan for ending slavery, and the repatriation scheme of the Ameri- can Colonization Society follow. One page is devoted to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. A two-page inset features Harriet Beecher Stowe and focuses on Uncle Tom's cabin, including its effect in stirring up Northern feelings, summed up in Lincoln's famous words to Stowe. The inset also introduces the Fugitive Slave Law, which does not appear in the main 186 narrative. Upon returning to the main narrative, a reader finds sectionalism defined and, abruptly in the same paragraph, the unfamiliar concept of states' rights: "The question of slavery was tied to another question as well. Did the federal government, in Washington, D.C., have the right to tell states what they could or could not do?" (238). Neither the question of how states' rights applies to sectional conflict nor the question of what the federal government attempted to force upon states is explained. Lincoln reappears and one learns his opinion of slavery. In America: Yesterday and Today (Scott, Foresman 1988), a fifth grade textbook, the unit of analysis is the first two lessons of Chapter 10 (222-230). While discus- sion of slavery is general, a former slave's words give vivid illustration. The legacies of black music and dance are sketched, touching on matters familiar to the reader. The topic of slave resistance and rebellion includes the roles of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Discussion of escape from slavery centers on the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. No link is drawn to the Mexican War; instead, the tariff of 1832 is seen as fomenting section- alism, and it allows the concept of states' rights to be explained with a concrete example. The Missouri Com- promise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act follow as further contributors to sectionalism. An excerpt from Lincoln's "house divided" speech ends the 187 lesson. The passage examined in The united States: Yesterday and Today (Silver Burdett and Ginn 1988) features the personification of North and South with the figures of Lincoln and Davis. Even though this device helps to explain the Civil War itself, it confuses a reader's understanding of sectional conflict: a more apt pairing historically would be Lincoln with Stephen A. Douglas who is not mentioned. The discussion of the three regional sections merging into two, especially after the analogy to the two men and two regions, may also confuse a fifth- grade reader. The concept of states' rights is not explained or linked to sectional conflict. That the Fugitive Slave Law is explained only in an inset and not in the main narrative is not necessarily fragmenting, but this textbook avoids discussion altogether of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Despite the abstract nature of these agreements, they would appear essential to understanding sectional conflict. Chattel slavery is another difficult concept to convey to young readers; this textbook explains it clearly but does not furnish examples to which names attach. In America: Yesterday and Today (Scott, Foresman 1988), the passage about sectionalism is less disconnected than in The United States: Yesterday and Today. Aboli- tionism appears in the previous chapter. The 1832 Tariff, 188 the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 are explained clearly; tariffs are defined in a previous chapter, and maps illustrate the agreements of 1820, 1850, and 1854. The Free and the Brave (Rand McNally 1980), an eighth grade textbook, treats events leading to the Civil War in one chapter titled "The Rise of Lincoln," although Lincoln appears only in the last two of four sections. The prefatory matter to the chapter is fragmented: Lincoln, Samuel Morse, the first baseball game, and the first surgical use of ether all appear on the same page; of the four, only Lincoln appears in the chapter; and no chapter purpose is set forth. Immediately following, however, is an assessment of Whigs and Democrats that sets the stage for the election of 1848. The "trouble" clearly begins with the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 (390-391), and events follow with clear connections. John Brown is made to sound a rational man: "An extremely religious man, Brown believed that God intended him to free the slaves" (399). Lincoln, Sumner, and Seward never come to life, as do Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. Words are not minced in the case of Buchanan who "was just like his party. He looked strong and healthy but was actually weak and ailing" (400). The passage can be faulted for its covering many events, and the absence of an introduction 01' a summary. 189 America's Story (Houghton Mifflin 1988), another eighth grade textbook, begins its chapter on competing national and sectional interests with a timeline, an overview, and four questions to direct a reader. The issue of slavery calls forth a review of the Missouri Compromise, introduced some hundred pages before. The Mexican War is shown to have renewed the question of whether new territories should enter the Union as slave or free. Wilmot's proposal to make slavery unlawful in the territories that might be won from Mexico leads to discussion of the Free-Soil party, California statehood, the Compromise of 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Law. In the second section, events follow in swift succes- sion: Northern defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, Sumner's beating, birth of the Republican Party, the Dred Scott case, an inset on the impact of Stowe's book, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, insets on Buchanan and political debate, and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In the third section Lincoln is elected and South Carolina secedes. Twenty-nine pages enable explanation of the multitude of events, but little that is dramatic stands out. The many insets make the pages appear overly busy. These four books demonstrate a considerable amount of seemingly obligatory name dropping--Stephen A. Douglas, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Millard Fillmore--that forces 190 a superficial treatment and, therefore, superficial understanding, of figures and events. Each of these figures has a place in history, but, given limited space, a general editor must select to do justice to some of them. The economic basis of sectional conflict is slighted in all but America's Story. The connection between the Tariff of 1832 and making a living is not explicit in America: Yesterday and Today, as it must be made for fifth graders. Although the moral basis of oppo- sition to slavery is a frequently-sounded theme, the con- tribution of religious feeling is virtually absent in all the textbooks discussed; and the pulpits of the 18503 were quite different forums from those of today, although the differences are not explained. Only in The Free and the Brave are there elements of a story: but what is missing between Wilmot's Proviso, which politicized sectionalism, and Lincoln's election in 1860, which solidified it, is the rising action. The economic and spiritual engines, as it were, of sectional conflict remain shrouded while one name or event chases another. A fifth or eighth grade synonym for sectionalism is hate but that, apparently, is not a word approved for textbook use notwithstanding its having been a powerful force binding otherwise discon- nected figures and events. 191 Cowboys This topic was chosen because it did not constitute a chain of events, is present in the popular imagination, and has an anonymous nature, as histories of the presi- dents do not. The American People (McDougal, Littell 1989), an eleventh grade textbook, has a section about cowboys that appears between sections about broken Indian treaties and farmers on the frontier. The cowboy is "[p]robably the greatest American folk hero" (35). Mexico is cited as the birthplace of the cattle industry and of the Texas longhorn shortly after the Civil War. The Texas ranching industry is sketched, as is Joseph G. McCoy's 1847 cattle drive to Abilene along the Chisholm trail. A typi- cal day in the life of a cowboy during a cattle drive is described, and the romantic myth punctured. Dime western novels, Buffalo Bill, and Owen Wister lead in to the 1907 filming of The Great Train Robbery. Black cowboys are mentioned, and the gritty truth told about Billy the Kid,4 Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane. Demographic shifts brought prosperity to the cattle industry until the disastrous blizzard of 1885-86, which was followed by a drought. These disasters brought an end to the frontier that had supported cattle drives and cow- boys. The style is straightforward with occasional phrases to the reader: "As you may imagine . . . What was the truth?" Quotations are apt; linkages to familiar 192 technology, such as the refrigerated railroad car, call upon a reader's own experience. Some sentences are unnaturally and embarassingly short, especially for a high school textbook, and tend to confirm the suspicion that readability formulas have been applied during the writing: "A herd could cover ten to twenty miles a day. So a long drive lasted about three to four months" (37). The writing never rises to drama, perhaps because incidents are cowboy-generic and not specific: In order to save the animals, the cowboys rode their swimming horses into the tangle of horns and kicking hooves. They hit at the steers, shouting and trying to make them head for the bank. Many a man was swept off by the current and his body never found A History of the U.S. Since 1861 (Prentice Hall 1990), another eleventh grade textbook, describes the cattle kingdom after sections on Indians and mining, and before one on the farmer's frontier. Sequence is neither strictly chronological nor logical. After an introductory paragraph about cowboys, a curious detour is made to northern plains life as depicted in Giants in the Earth, without giving Ole Rblvaag's dates. The detour, iron- ically, seems to have been made to introduce women on the plains. After one of Rdlvaag's female characters is quoted, this paragraph appears: To survive and build a family on the Great Plains, a woman had to be many things. She had to be a soldier holding off Indians, a farmer and a rancher, a parent and a teacher. Without women's courage and their efforts the vast open West might never have 193 grown its permanent settlements. It is not surpris- ing, then, that in 1869 wyoming Territory became the first place in the nation to give women the vote and that western states were among the first to elect women governors (87). This passage and the previous one about Rblvaag's female settler are the third and fourth paragraphs in a section titled "The cattle kingdom"; needless, to say, context is wrenched to include settler women in a discussion of cow- boys. On the same page appears, appropriately, an 18903' photograph of three women branding a calf on a Colorado ranch. The text, however, shifts back to discussion of men who made money, which appears to have been the principal attraction of ranching. The cattlemen are compared to the European peasant who "could keep only a few [cattle] because his house was small and he had to feed his animals by hand in winter" (87). When compared to the cattle owner, the differences are great; however, had the peasant been compared to the cowboy, the resemblances may have been more striking than the contrasts. A recurrent theme in this textbook is the Go-Getter as prototypic entrepreneur. Even though the myth of the cowboy ended with the open range, that of the Go-Getter is eminently renewable. The accounts of three Go-Getters, enterprising cattlemen who pioneered new marketing methods, are mixed with descriptions of Texas longhorns, the skills of cowboys, and the organization of the cattle drive. The ostensible theme, the cattle drive, 194 is displaced by that of go-getting: at the end of a long, dusty drive is a "handsome profit" (88). The writing is lively and features five dollar signs in five pages. The prose is nervous: "bold, adventurous, risky, energetic" are typical adjectives. To combat a stampede, cowboys drove the cattle in a circle. If the encircling tactic failed, all was lost. The stampede would get out of control. Then the cattle would fly out like sparks into the night, and they might never be seen again (89). Next, cowboys somehow are elevated to Go-Getterdom. "Western cattlemen and cowboys were among the first and bravest of the Go-Getters. They tried the impossible and succeeded in making something from nothing" (91). In fact, like miners, cattlemen exploited natural resources: government-owned buffalo grass and water, and wild cattle. Apparent in both textbooks, which span the periods from 1877 to the present and from 1861 to the present, is a relaxation in coverage: both accounts of cowboys are interesting, and neither is crammed with facts. The net result, in this case, argues against the practice of making United States history textbooks comprehensive for all periods. Between accounts of government efforts to Ameri- canize the Indians and farmers, the section "Ranchers build a cattle kingdom on the plains" receives four pages in Triumph of the American Nation (Harcourt Brace 195 Jovanovich 1986), an eleventh grade textbook. Cowboys are set in time and place; they learned how to handle cattle from Mexican vaqueros. An estimated one-third of those who worked in cattle raising were freed slaves. Buffalo Bill's and others' wild west shows are featured in an inset: "These stereotypes gave a false but enduring impression of the American West" (497). Set next to the expansion of the railroads, sheep raising, farming, and drought, the fleeting economics of open-range cattle ranching is explained. Although not fragmented, the passage does not capture life on the range; not one rancher is mentioned by name. Given a map of the "Western Railroads and Cattle Trails," (498) a reader is apt to be curious about how cattle were driven as much as 1,100 miles. Cowboys are paired with railroads in The United States: Its History and Neighbors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988), a fifth grade textbook; "The railroads helped make the cowboy an important figure. The railroads also brought the settlement that ended the cowboy way of life" (445). Joseph McCoy's stockyards are described to show how cattle were driven to the railroad lines. The important cow towns and the Chisholm Trail are named. Less than one page of coverage leaves little space for describing the life of cowboys themselves. 196 Abraham Lincoln Unless readers are shrewd judges of the Gettysburg Address, which is reprinted in most of the textbooks discussed in this section, they would never suspect that Abraham Lincoln was a great man. As might be expected of a major historical figure, Lincoln's mention is frequent, but scattered, in textbooks--in connection with the 1860 campaign debates, with Secession, with the Civil War, with Reconstruction--but no coherent account of his life emerges. No unit of analysis suggests itself for this topic. Some attention is given to accounts of the young Lincoln in elementary textbooks. The United States: Its History and Neighbors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988), a fifth grade textbook, lists the jobs Lincoln held before passing the bar in 1836, but the next date listed in his life is 1860. TWO Centuries of Progress (Laidlaw 1977), an eighth grade textbook, depicts the Lincoln-Douglas debates with an unrelieved flatness: Lincoln's name had been well known in national politics since 1858. That was the year when Lincoln and Douglas, while running for the Senate, had debated the issue of slavery. The people of Illinois had returned Douglas to the Senate. But the Lincoln- Douglas debates had made Lincoln well known. People knew he believed that slavery was wrong and should not be allowed in the territories. That belief became a major part of the Republican party platform in 1860 (298). This passage takes the debate out of the debate; one never 197 learns what position Douglas took. The passage is also misleading in two ways: first, at issue in the debates was not slavery but popular sovereignty, an idea of Lewis Cass that electors could choose whether territories would be slave or free. By 1850 Douglas had embraced popular or squatter sovereignty to "check the magnetic pull toward the opposite poles of Wilmot and Calhoun" (Tindall 1984, 575). One of the implications of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 was that the Missouri Compromise of 1850 had violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, as argued by Calhoun, in denying the right of citizens to hold slaves which were property. Although Congress had repealed the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, "the decision now pointed a thrust at popular sovereignty" (Tindall 1984, 600). Lincoln challenged Douglas on this point during the second debate at Freeport. Douglas's response became known as the Freeport doctrine, that despite Supreme Court rulings, slavery could take effect only if supported by local legislation. Second, the textbook also errs in stating the people of Illinois returned Douglas to the Senate: until 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, and not popular vote. The flatness of the debate passage is matched only by the utter lack of drama in a 198 description of Lincoln's assassination: Lincoln knew how hard a job it would be to bring the former Confederate states back into the Union. But the job was not to be his. Three days later he was struck down by an assassin's bullet. Lincoln was one of the last victims of the Civil War (305). Perhaps characteristically, the Emancipation Proclamation is substituted for the Gettysburg Address in this volume. Lincoln's appearances in The Free and the Brave (Rand McNally 1980), an eighth grade textbook, are more "rounded." His heroes, Jefferson and Clay (404) are introduced, as are his reasons for respecting them. His pride in his having delivered the house divided speech demonstrates Lincoln's moral conviction (404), and his long-term strategy in the debates--to undermine the base of Douglas's pyramid--are made plain (405). A choppy account of the Cooper Union speech is made dramatic by Lincoln's poor entrance: That night Lincoln made his speech. Because he was a clumsy man, dressed in an ill-fitting suit, people did not think very much of him at first. His voice was very high as he began. And the audience was noisy. But soon Lincoln's words could be heard clearly throughout the hall (408). Quotation is frequent and apt. The diplomatic reasons for the Emancipation Proclamation are set forth (434). History of the American People (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986), an eleventh grade textbook, is to be commended for stating that Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the civil War; however, it errs in -,, w - 199 saying that "only a few opponents of the war were actually put into jail" (282). According to Tindall (1984), "There were probably more than 14,000 arrests made without a writ of habeas corpus" (I, 651). Triumph of the American Nation (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986), another high school textbook, features some of the events in Lincoln's public life starting with 1847 when, as a member of Con- gress, he introduced Spot Resolutions that questioned whether the spot where American blood had been shed on the north bank of the Rio Grande had been United States soil. None of the textbooks in this section demonstrate the humanity they assert Lincoln possessed. One never learns of the letter to Mrs. Bixby; one cannot sense the Biblical cadences of the Second Inaugural from the merest excerpts. The sources of Lincoln's tenacity and convic- tion are seldom explored. The paucity of material about religion in textbooks has been documented; in Lincoln's case what is notably omitted is discussion of the Bible, in which his thought and prose were steeped. Lincoln's sense of humor emerges only in elementary textbooks, as if humor were reserved solely for children; indeed, most textbooks are pillars of solemnity. One seldom learns of Lincoln's formative years, of the experiences he shared and the knowledge he came to possess that enabled him, unlike most contemporary politicians, both to become elected and to write speeches that continue to echo in our 200 heads. There is a great lesson, what John Szarkowski called an archetypal classicism of the ordinary, in Lincoln's own life and words that textbooks must elucidate. The Civil Rights Movement The antecedents of the civil rights movement of the 19503 and 19603 go back to the 17803 when more than 50,000 free blacks lived in the United States, mostly in the Middle Atlantic States. The United States: A History of the Republic (Prentice Hall 1988), an eleventh grade textbook, describes the limited civil rights these free blacks possessed. It also explains the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Jim Crow laws of the 18903. Since these events are widely separated in time and, therefore, in the textbook, the unit of analysis must be oriented topically and not spatially. Black emigration west occurred in response to segregation and violence (423). The Atlanta Compromise of Booker T. Washington--trading civil and political rights for prosperity--is contrasted to the vigorous protest against segregation laws by W. E. B. Du Bois (423-425). More background information covers Franklin Delano Roosevelt's denunciation of lynching (619); the experience of blacks during World War II in government, the armed 201 services and at home; and the Detroit riots of 1943 (646). Jackie Robinson enters the major leagues in 1947 and President Harry Truman issues an executive order banning segregation in the armed forces in 1948 (687). The only antecedents not mentioned are the experiences of blacks returning from World War I, the 1919 riots, post-war Klan activities, and the civil rights cases on black post- graduate education from 1938 to 1950. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's rapid rise in membership after World War II and the Brown v. Board of Education decision are described, the latter in an inset (693). These events complete the background information. The bus boycott initiated by Rosa Park is followed by sit-ins, the first black mass movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 leads to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech is featured in an inset. An account of the Freedom Riders coincides with an explanation of civil rights organ- izations and the Black Muslims. The Black Power movement is seen to taper off (710); from some other sources, it was killed off. Most of the violence that accompanied the civil rights movement is portrayed. There are two prob- lems with the textbook's account. First, linkages are not explicit; one event does not refer to another unless immediately adjacent: a reader must weave the connections. 202 Second, too many events are narrated with insufficient depth. America and Its Neighbors (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986), a fifth grade textbook, covers the founding of the NAACP in 1909, the 1919 riots, and the rise of the Klan as background information for the civil rights movement (331). It defines civil rights and Lyndon B. Johnson's part in codifying them (382). A four-page section is devoted to the struggle for civil rights and tells the stories of Linda Brown, Rosa Parks, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall (392-396). Concepts are of a difficulty appropriate to the age level and a reasonable number are presented. Obviously, fifth graders do not encounter as much violence as occurred. Conclusions The chief influence responsible for fragmentation in most of the textbooks under study is an excessive number of topics, most visible as name dropping; excessive coverage is found at all levels and can vary appreciably throughout a textbook. The habit of mentioning is especially apparent in discussion of immigrant, minority, and women's contributions. An example follows from a fifth grade textbook. Many immigrants to the United States in the late 1800's and early 1900's made important contributions to our society. Hungarian-born Joseph Pulitzer was a famous journalist and publisher. Mary Anderson, a Swedish immigrant, became a labor union organizer and 203 an official in the United States Department of Labor, Claude McKay, of Jamaica in the Caribbean, was a respected novelist and poet. Charles Steinmetz, a German immigrant, helped Thomas Edison develop uses for electricity in the United States. Irving Berlin, a Russian immigrant, wrote "God Bless America." Simon Rodia was an Italian immigrant sculptor who built a group of unusual, attention-getting towers in Watts, California (America and its Neighbors, Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986, 303). Another example comes from an eleventh grade textbook: During reconstruction, blacks held public office on the local, state, and national levels of govern- ment. Many sat in the state legislatures. Alonso Ransier, Richard Gleaves, Oscar Dunn, P.B.S. Pinch- back, and C.C. Antoine were lieutenant-governors. Pinchback was also an acting governor of Louisiana for 43 days in 18473 when the governor, Henry C. Warmouth, was removed from office. Samuel J. Lee and Robert B. Elliott each served as Speaker of the House of Representatives in South Carolina. Francis L. Cardozo, who had been educated at British univer- sities, was South Carolina's Secretary of State from 1868 to 1872, and its treasurer from 1872 to 1876 (History of the American People, Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1986, 313-314). An influence almost as significant is the lack of connec- tions between and among topics, especially at the higher grade levels. The representation of groups sometimes distorts the historical record: the habit of mentioning becomes a principle of leveling that makes difficult distinguishing among the historically significant, less significant, and insignificant. The choppy style that FitzGerald (1980) observed in 19703 textbooks appears also in 19803 textbooks and may reflect the practice of applying readability formulas during their writing. 204 We 1. Textbooks contain excessive ahistorical elements. This hypothesis can be accepted; although textbooks seem to contain a small amount of ahistoricism, their overall impression is one of superficial treatment which tends to promote presentism. 2. Ahistoricism can be categorized into types. This hypothesis can be accepted: types of ahistor- icism included fictional representation, omission, false emphasis, and futurism. 3. The types of ahistoricism can be characterized. This hypothesis can be accepted: fictional representation can be characterized as attributing historical authenticity to fictional creations. Omission is leaving out information essential to a reader's decision-making. False emphasis means either attributing historical significance to events or figures that do not possess it, or exaggerating the historical significance they do possess. 4. The types of ahistoricism vary by grade level. This hypothesis can be accepted for one type of ahistoricism: fictional representation is more frequent at elementary and middle school levels. For the other types of ahistoricism the variance by grade level cannot be determined because of their inability to be measured precisely. 205 5. The presence of ahistorical elements can be explained by certain factors. This hypothesis can be accepted. Fictional repre- sentation may be explained by developmental considera- tions and the need for younger children to comprehend events in the form of a story. Omission can be explained by the tendency of publishers to avert controversy, espe- cially in the case of recent events. False emphasis can be explained by the influence of other media. Futurism can be explained by the millenary strain in American thought. 6. The frequency of types of ahistoricism can be determined. This hypothesis can be accepted only for fictional representation; since the other types have neither strict boundaries nor degrees, they do not lend themselves to precise determination. 7. Ahistorical elements will be more frequent in elementary textbooks. This hypothesis is inconclusive insofar as most types of ahistoricism are incapable of precise measure- ment. 8. The content of textbooks is excessively fragmented. This hypothesis can be accepted, given the excessive coverage and superficial treatment in most textbooks under study. 9. The content of fragmented textbooks can be categorized. 206 This hypothesis can be accepted. Types of frag- mentation include: dislocation, excessive coverage, superficial treatment, inappropriate devices, insufficient examples, insufficient relations among concepts, lack of purpose-setting, and ideological interference. 10. The types of fragmentation can be characterized. This hypothesis can be accepted. Dislocation is the inappropriate placing of an idea, event, or figure in a narrative. Excessive coverage is treating more topics than a reader can be reasonably expected to comprehend or retain. Superficial treatment is mentioning figures or events without explaining them at a level which makes them memorable. Inappropriate devices are literary tools that interfere with reader comprehension. The category of insufficient examples means that the difficulty of a concept warrants more cases to explain it than are given. Insufficient relations among concepts means that the connections among ideas, figures, or events are not made explicit. Lack of purpose-setting means that the content goal of a topic is not evident to a reader. Ideological interference is the competition between an ostensible theme and a submerged theme for the attention of a reader. 11. Certain factors explain fragmentation. This hypothesis can be accepted. The effort to represent certain groups without regard to their histor- ical significance or appropriate context can explain some 207 instances of fragmentation. An overemphasis on facts and inappropriate assumptions of reader background knowledge or retention can be responsible for fragmentation. 12. The frequency of types of fragmentation can be determined. This hypothesis is inconclusive because most types of fragmentation have boundaries and degrees that do not admit of precise measurement. 13. The types of fragmentation vary by grade level. This hypothesis is inconclusive because categories cannot be uniformly defined. 14. Fragmentation will be more frequent in high school textbooks. This hypothesis is inconclusive because determin- ations of what is appropriate for various grade levels and what is fragmentary are controversial and imprecise. 15. Fragmentation will be more frequent for recent history. This hypothesis can be accepted in light of #5 above in that omission interferes with coherence. That histor- ians seldom agree about recent events may also contribute to fragmentation. 16. Textbooks reflect ahistorical approaches or ahistor- ical educational philosophies. This hypothesis can be accepted. The effort to represent certain groups and the tendency to avoid 208 controversy have been seen as factors in an ahistoricism that evades depth. 17. Some appearances of fragmentation coincide with those of ahistoricism. This hypothesis can be accepted. Fragmentation and ahistoricism interpenetrate. Superficial treatment, and cascading figures and events produce not only incoherence but also a view of the past that is as shallow as most television news programs. Summary Each of the types of ahistoricism--fictional. representation, omission, false emphasis, and futurism-- may be attributable to cursory or superficial treatment. This superficial treatment, in turn, is indicative of a textbook philosophy that puts a premium on "mentioning" that, more than any other influence, is responsible for an acute presentism. Without full explanation, without treatment in depth, the past in textbooks never emerges as more than an extension of the present. The various types of fragmentation--dislocation, excessive coverage, super- ficial tratment, inappropriate devices, insufficient examples, insufficient relations--too, derive from the surface treatment of figures and events. Ahistoricism and fragmentation interpenetrate and may be attributable to a textbook philosophy that is more quantitative than 209 qualitative; both are geared more to the mere mention of historical subjects than to a treatment appropriate to their significance and to their being understood by a child reader. WORKS CITED FitzGerald, Frances. 1980. America revised: History schoolbooks in the twentieth century. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House; first published Atlantic-Little Brown, 1979. Tindall, George Brown. 1984. America: A narrative his- tory, 2 vols. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company. 210 CHAPTER V SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION Summary The professional literature on United States history textbooks suggests they are the major source of information about their heritage for most citizens. Although textbooks have become more accurate and less tendentious than some in the past, seldom do their narratives compel a reader to finish a chapter or look further into the particulars of figures or events that can be expected to inspire curiosity. They are no less formula books than best selling novels. The weight of the average high school United States history textbook, an oppressive four or five pounds, stands as the most forbidding obstacle to its becoming children's litera- ture. In attempting to be comprehensive, educators and pub- lishers have represented too much and refined too little; all things considered, there are probably fewer items on a newspaper page than on many textbook pages. The impetus to scale down bulimic coverage is not likely to occur, given advocacy groups muscle-flexing for inclusion. The levers of influence, as perhaps should be the case in a republic, are pulled frequently by various interests but, given the 211 212 absence of textbook standards, those interests are frequently appeased. Ironically, despite pluralism, the United States may still be more unified than its history textbooks. The principle of local control of the public schools is synonymous with curriculum-by-textbook--which corresponds to government by bureaucracy--for few states, teachers, or districts have the resources, expertise, or latitude to develop curriculum materials for the more than six centuries of North American history. Decisions about what to include in a textbook depend also on "social context" which is "crucial to addressing problems in the social studies curriculum," and "the complexities involved make solutions far from straightforward" (Beck, McKeown, and Gromoll 1989, 101). As one example of that complexity, Alan Peshkin (1978) found the community under study to limit the intel- lectual attainment of students. In a chapter called "Paradise Maintained?" Peshkin asserted: In fact, any school that fosters intellectual development beyond the level of the local community contributes to intergenerational instability, whereas, schooling that merely reaches the community's comfort level encourages a measure of control that tends to keep people in place. Ironically, reform efforts designed to raise the educational level are often resisted because of their cost and their alien ring: many communities, accordingly, have self-imposed inhibitors to their children's mobility (200). This cold reception toward intellectual achievement may help 213 explain the paucity of materials in textbooks on the life of the mind, as noted by FitzGerald (1980). Crispus Attucks, a black victim of the Revolution often is mentioned, but John Adams often is not, despite the Public Broadcasting System series "The Adams Chronicles" that featured four generations of Adamses. The tendency of television news to determine historical agenda is evident in textbooks, but documentaries apparently have little effect. Besides bolstering stability in communities, history is also expected to temper the onslaught of change by supporting the status quo: Marc Bloch called textbooks the "always admirable tools of sclerosis" (1953, 148). Because of its legitimizing function, history in the social studies curriculum is not likely to be displaced, although the nature of textbook history is likely to con- tinue to change. Emerson's famous dictum that, "There is properly no history, only biography," is largely out of fashion and out of textbooks. The artifice of narrative history has been challenged by quantitative historians who rely instead on the artifice of statistics, which may be no less a "lie agreed upon" (Voltaire). History to the student reader, however, is synonymous with narrative historiog- raphy. Neither human activity nor the existing records of such activity take the form of narrative, which is the product of complex cultural forms and deep-seated linguistic conventions deriving from choices that have 214 traditionally been called rhetorical; there is no "straight" way to invent a history, regardless of the honesty and professionalism of the historian (Kellner 1989, vii). The language of the historical text must represent a mental image that will always strive for coherence. If consciousness is discontinuous, and the historical record is equally discontinuous, we nevertheless use our narrative abilities to make that record appear seamless (54). Perhaps one reason for the trend toward social history is the changed scale of social operations: since the Civil War individual actors have been harder to identify because of mass movements and large organizations, resulting in a bureaucratic history in which nobody rules. FitzGerald's summary is still apt: . . . this neglect of character in the schoolbooks is an aesthetic impoverishment. In the days of Muzzey, Amer- ican history had gentlemen, shysters, hotheads, states- men, and fools; it now has only cipher people, who say very little and think nothing--who have no passions and no logic (1980, 154). Increasing academization, as was seen in Chapter II, has lead to an increasingly narrow definition of history, one that does not embrace disciplines that have since become separate university departments. Yet history is more elastic than other disciplines. The chemical professor might at any moment invade the domain of history, and oust the historical professor from his throne; but the historical professor could still more easily invade the chemical laboratory, and demonstrate his laws of R8ntgen--or any other--rays. The fact that the problem might be staged in terms of astronomical mass proved that it might even more readily be illustrated by the laboratory experiments on electric mass; and the demonstration was easy, for, within the possible error of a few technical terms, the 215 law was mathematically definite. The professor of history would lecture to the students of chemistry in their own familiar formulas . . . (Adams 1909). In the years since Henry Adams's death in 1918, only two undisputed "world class" thinkers have written on educa- tionin English--John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. Close, mostly by implication, are Alfred North Whitehead and Hannah Arendt; thus, the "authorities" have become persons who have not had to demonstrate any extra-professional competence whatsoever. Both education and history textbooks reflect the insularity of this phenomenon. FitzGerald's extra-profes- sional status may explain her impact on textbook publishing and on the educational criticism of textbooks: the authori- tativeness of her analysis depended not on statistical analysis but on her abilities as a reader. No other writer on textbooks has demonstrated her scope, wit, or grasp of the issues. She likes history; she cares about textbooks; and neither of her concerns characterizes most writers or textbooks studied here. 92112111312113 To the problem of ahistoricism and fragmentation in United States history books, no one direction points to resolution. Schools of education or of technical writing may develop programs to train writers of history textbooks, but the task may be too daunting for one person in an age 216 when a professional historian devotes a career to a fifteen- year period or less. The history profession itself would first have to accomodate historical synthesis, as Hertzberg argued (1981), then there are the intricacies of writing, child development, and pedagogy to master. Even if a master writer of textbooks were to surface, the team structure of publishing tends to violate the integrity and unity of one conceiving mind. As was seen in Chapter II, the unity prom- ised by introducing the framework of citizenship education into the social studies never materialized. For United States history to remain in the social studies, curriculum architects must eliminate redundancy so that some of the periods in United States history can be studied in greater depth. The omission of the history of science, as opposed to technology, from most textbooks is a serious one; hence, curriculum synthesis in the form of a science-technology-society framework offers distinct advan- tages, but departing from the framework of the disciplines does represent the risk of ahistoricism. To accomplish such a radical shift would require a consensus to be mobilized among educational leaders to move the vast inertial system of educators, publishers, adoption committees, and parents. To advocate a framework that is not based on chronology would be in itself an uphill battle. Without an impetus for change, textbooks and history 217 in the social studies may continue in the schools but with decreasing vitality. Simultaneously, both the processes of determining and evaluating content must change. Whether mandated by curriculum guides or publishers, the practice of "coverage" in textbooks forces a superficial treatment of events that makes history appear inevitable; this super- ficial treatment, more than any other single factor, under- mines history's most significant lesson, that of the sense of human mastery, "the force confronting the weight of tradition: human choice" (Kellner 1989, 196). As Jerome Bruner pointed out, "narrative deals with the vicissitudes of intention" (1986, 17). If publishers cannot collectively establish textbook standards, then perhaps individual publishers may. Framed as principles, these standards could furnish both credi- bility and criteria for evaluation, and may not necessarily limit publishers' ability to respond to market pressures. The training of teachers is germane to what kind of text- books are produced: history is seldom required of social studies teachers at any level; traditionally, coaches, who are even less likely to have majored in history, have most often been social studies teachers. The present condition of training among social studies teachers perpetuates a high degree of dependency on textbooks. A remedy that can be applied immediately is to 218 introduce antidotes to the textbook in the form of resources that introduce controversy or promote in-depth study. A good example is Voices of America: Readings in American History by Thomas R. Frazier (Houghton Mifflin 1985). Although not every teacher is qualified to venture far from the confines of teacher's editions, some students are; and there are degrees of teacher dependence on textbooks. Cron- bach (1950) called the stage of greatest teacher initiative and control a "Level I" activity (Table 1). New textbook initiatives hold promise. Scott, Foresman and Company has published a History and Life textbook, and Houghton Mifflin Company has introduced a social studies series that meets the California Framework with history and biography sup- ported by literature. Another remedy would be for evalua- tors of textbooks to review them at a length commensurate to each textbook and not according to predetermined criteria, or to a checklist, the evaluator's equivalent of a multiple- choice test. Finally, if the writing of textbooks continues to fail to capture the imagination of readers, the remedy may be for schools to abstain from their use. In a review of a book cited as a resource in this study, Edgar A. Friedenberg wrote: Many of their 21 papers are written in the flat, impersonal style considered appropriate for scholarly discourse to which students are introduced, in its earliest and crudest form, by textbooks unrelated to 219 asucoum Hoonom someone Hoozom one .muo .souoafino no asuooum Hoocom nausea .xoon measoenou macho .uenooea one assumes Ixuos .uxos use» one oceawa huwcsaaoo no moousomou some mucosa» maneueusa use couoaeno no IHH£0 no enema use .xoon .mewuw>wuoo enema .monosma .mezooou .uxea rxuos .uxea .muoou .mooceflmomxm edema voohnsu aw finances human no xoon pause» ruse no nuance summon one axes Ixuos no uxea on on umeocoo - oszzaqm quuuq.uuauIHaIwaundulquzHamuHualllllll. mo memmc Aoma .omma nonncouo “sedans: .m .> an usage 6 sons omauaeoa. masseuse assofiuosuuuSH no momma cause me useaenfiucommom success we mH0>0q “a dance 220 their personal experience. That these authors express themselves in this style even when discussing issues of vital concern to them is clear evidence of the persistent chilling effect of schooling (88). The "static neo-Confucian" style of textbooks mirrors their message (FitzGerald 1980, 59), the more unusual in a nation with a revolutionary heritage and legacy of protest. Style must resolve what Ricoeur called the "paradox of historical methodology," a paradox arising "from the double interest it serves: the interest of knowledge (which implies a naturalistic, scientific history) and the interest for communication (which implies an evaluative, interpretive history)" (Kellner 1989, 279). Textbooks may be serving the former interest, but unless a balance is achieved between the interests of knowledge and communication, knowledge becomes forgettable. What may be unrecoverable is what FitzGerald called "their single voice of authority" (1980, 20): despite the advantages of computerization, specializ- ation, and pages teeming with graphics, literary style remains the attribute of the idiosyncratic writer, idiosyncratic because style depends on self and mastery. Of course what we should all like to attain in writing history is style, "the last acquirement of the educated mind; . . . the ultimate morality of mind." Unfortunately, there is no royal road to style. It cannot be attained by mere industry; it can never be achieved through imitation, although it may be promoted by example. Reading the greatest literary artists among historians will help, but what was acceptable style in 1850 might seem turgid today (Morison 1954). 221 Style continues to elude capture by quantitative study, which is not to say that informed minds cannot reach agreement on what constitutes a distinctive style. Perhaps the most serious charge leveled against professional histo- rians is that they have substituted quantification for the masterworks of their profession. As Dominick LaCapra has pointed out, the recent surge of social history to leadership in historical studies has brought with it devaluation of, even scorn for, other types of historical pursuits. LaCapra laments the anti- intellectualism of social history, which would see all sources as documents and devalue the master-texts of a culture as ideological, elite cultural products. His most radical charge, that "in a sense, historians are professionally trained not to read," points up the problem of social history's attempts to assume the role of "the mother hen of historiography in general" (Kellner 1989, 122). As Friedenberg (1989) and Hertzberg (1980) implied, publishers have yet to tap a fundamental determinant of curriculum, student interests. Eliot Wigginton's Foxfire magazine and books have demonstrated how history can inter- est students if grounded in the local and the tangible. That a conservatively estimated 200,000 persons pursue a historical interest in the Civil War should also strongly suggest the origins of student motivation to publishers of textbooks. The interests of Civil War buffs appear strongly motivated by material culture: in uniforms, weaponry, period dress, regimental regalia, and family and local ties. The buffs are reclaiming their history and acquiring not a 222 little scholarship en route. The only information on mate- rial culture in textbook histories is found in sections on technology, whose treatment is often curious: Samuel Slater, an English emigrant who performed industrial espionage in the textile industry, appears in textbook after textbook, while Oliver Evans, an American inventor whose design for a automated flour mill was in operation before 1800, is seldom mentioned. The vernacular traditions and achievements in American life often receive short shrift. It may not be incidental that the Civil War was perhaps the last war in American history in which the common soldier could become a hero, in which individual actions were not always submerged by mass movements. Without history's connection to their own lives, students may never establish an historical identity, for the individual in modern life has been characterized as "the homeless mind," the equivalent of an exile. (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1973). In the vacuum left by a broken and fragmented tradition, history, like Ezra Pound's great poem, The cantos, becomes a catch basin of ruins. "Historic con- tinuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity" (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.). 223 11121123119113 However scorned by the contemporary reader, nine- teenth-century schoolbooks depicted an American typology that emerged from individual stories and reinforced the myth and ideology of a self-proclaimed people of God. For well over two centuries, under the most diverse conditions, the major spokesmen for a self-proclaimed people of God subsumed the facts of social pluralism (ethnic, economic, religious, even personal) in a comprehensive national ideal, transferred the terms of conflict normally inherent in that ideal from history to rhetoric, and secured the triumph of that rhetoric by identifying it with the assertion of a representa- tive American self (Bercovitch 1975, 186). The pluralization of the United States has had a secular- izing effect, "weakening the hold of religion on society and on the individual" (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1973, 80). The value judgment, no longer acceptable as the stock in trade of United States history textbooks, was the raison d'etre of nineteenth century ones. It may be that in ten years further a reviewer will find United States history embedded only in a world history textbook, for the novus ordo seclorum, like our system of mass education, is no longer unique, if by no means common, among nations. Per- haps as a nation we are ready to do this, to take our place among nations not in the language of millenialism but in the more sober tones of an experiment that has survived and continues. The impulse toward innocence is difficult to sustain once events like Credit Mobilier, Teapot Dome, the 224 Mexican War, Watergate, and the savings and loan crisis have accumulated in national memory: the litany of greatness must stand beside the chronicle of greed. The distinction between old and new worlds that Emerson defined in "The American Scholar" served to found a world-class literature but loses its appeal for the "global citizen." Yet, in a narrower sense, we are inevitably citizens of the local and to exercise that prerogative must do so according to the nature of our institutions and their res- pective interpenetrating histories. We can enlarge our scope only so far without losing focus. Even so "global" a writer as Shakespeare "peopled ancient Greece and Rome with timeless Englishmen" (Auden). However noble the aim of world-televised rock concerts, "We Are the World" better lends itself as a social studies theme than as a foreign policy doctrine. In fact the concept of "global education" may be no less naive, no less anti-intellectual, and no less ahistorical than the idea of Providence in Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. To the extent that children can see the contrast between these fictions and the world around them, this kind of instruction can only make them cynical. The textbooks' naivete about child psychology is matched only by their lack of respect for history (FitzGerald 1980, 218). We find ourselves, according to Maxine Greene, "in a period marked by jeremiads" (340). As in other American 225 reform efforts, so in the current rush for educational reform, a "sense of crisis is communicated; again, there is the suggestion of broken promises and a forgotten Dream" (Greene, 334). The revelation of America serves to blight, and ulti- mately to preclude, the possibility of fundamental social change. To condemn the profane is to commit oneself to a spiritual ideal. To condemn "false Americans" as profane is to express one's faith in a national ideology. In effect, it is to transform what might have been a search for moral or social alter- natives into a call for cultural revitalization (Bercovitch 1980, 179). The sense of experiment that persisted during the development of the United States is no less persistent in the history of education. The history of American education has been a history of reform, for an experiment, after all, is only a controlled crisis: reform, by definition, implies some confidence in an original thing. Since the publication of America at Risk in 1983, a series of calls for reform has kept "the necessary sense of crisis alive" (337). Recent calls for reform may have been prompted, Greene suggested, by a high school curriculum that is "closed to the search for moral and social alternatives" (341). The modes of interpretation (the constructs, the schemata) can be made accessible; what they make visible and audible and knowable must be discovered by the individual himself/herself. To suggest otherwise is to mystify; moreover, it is to truncate the learning process and to stifle conversation among those in quest (341). The many "utopian" experiments in American history 226 are largely absent in textbook histories. As Cochran predicted in 1948, the "presidential synthesis" in American textbook history has been broken: "When the United States is even two hundred years old instead of a hundred and fifty, it will no longer be possible to take up each presidential administration." Yet, as Hertzberg (1981) observed, no syn- thesis has emerged from among the competing accounts of social, ethnic and racial history, and-of popular culture; most textbooks, with unrelenting diligence, still take up the task of listing each president's dates and achievements, however lackluster or negligible. A tradition is an answer to an ongoing question; once the answer, however arbitrary, disappears, the question still remains. While the typology and the secular faith underpinning McGuffey readers and early history textbooks may be rejected out of hand, it is possible, even likely, to look back with nostalgia on the utter conviction with which nineteenth century textbook writers went about telling their version of the authorized story because they invented a unity that embraced plurality as we have not. Webster's blue-backed speller could stay in print virtually unchanged for decades because what it provided was adequate for decades. "All the information that could be given orally by the best of teachers, in a course of ten years, would not suffice to exhaust a single topic, and it 227 would be a very poor substitute for the power a pupil would obtain by mastering one single text-book for himself," said William Torrey Harris in 1893. Good spelling, clear handwriting, arithmetic through long division along with the formula for calculating the number of tons of corn silage (and only corn silage) in a silo, and some sense of form for correspondence were regarded as the basics or essentials to be acquired from the district school and were adequate preparation for generations of farm children either to take over the family farm, move west to a new one, or, increasingly, to migrate to the growing cities and there to compete with waves of foreign immigrants. Except for medicine, law, dentistry, and some denominations of the ministry, America gave on-the-job training in what became the curricula, by 1950, of most technical and engineering colleges. Henry Ford, George Eastman, and Thomas Edison, to name only three examples, had no more than "common school" educations. At least in technological development, coupled with the perceived adequacy of Webster's speller and McGuffey's readers, the anti-intellectual bias of Americans became an article of faith, all but constitutional, and, as Henry Adams discovered when he commissioned Augustus Saint Gaudens to make a sculpture for his wife's grave, strong sentiment existed that he should have spent the $25,000 for 228 the care of old soldiers who, raised on the textbooks of the day, could not even entertain the idea that the sculp- ture was its own justification. Indeed, this state of belief prevailed until 1957 when Sputnik broke free of earth and carried the hammer and sickle into orbit. Most of the problems in fifties', sixties', seventies', and eighties' textbooks may be traced to the shattering of an article of faith: what had always worked no longer worked; and in the decades since Sputnik, nothing has formed to take its place save inchoate blame on the schools and a concomitant equally nebulous belief the schools must be retooled to produce again what we once were. In the words of one fifth-grade textbook, "Reagan wanted to make the United States the number-one world leader again" (Scott Foresman 1988, 361). The last vestiges of Webster's blue- backed speller disintegrated in the Mekong Delta, another failed history lesson, another colonial war in another country to be made safe for democracy. Instead of Webster's speller and McGuffey's readers, television--in the vacuum produced by increasing pluralization--has become the core curriculum, a citizenship manual for consumers and spectators. "If America is not 'the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow,‘ [as] Thoreau wrote near the end of his life, then 'to what end does the world go on . . . ?'" 229 (Bercovitch 1975, 181). The pathos for the new so prevalent in American life persists: even historical research, in areas where only erudition may be possible, continues to value "original" work (Hertzberg 1981). This pathos is evident even in Dewey: For confusion is due ultimately to aimlessness, as much of the conflict is due to the attempt to follow tradition and yet introduce radically new material and interests into it--the attempt to superimpose the new on the old. . . . Only new aims can inspire educational effort for clarity and unity. They alone can reduce confusion; if they do not terminate conflict they will at least render it intelligent and profitable (Dewey 1931, 426). The successful efforts of the founders to make a place for freedom in the political realm have meant that consti- tutional government has not to be reinvented, but the American faith in education represents another dimension of freedom. The stories of Lincoln, whose education carried him from log cabin to the White House and carried the United States from isolation to an emergent world power, and of Franklin, whose personal development was coterminus with that of Philadelphia and the early nation, appear dull and lifeless in textbook versions, lacking the wit and the broad, pointed humor that characterized both men. As Lincoln had grown up on the Illinois/Indiana frontier so had Franklin, in his move from Boston to Philadelphia, grown to citizenship in an urban one. It is perhaps this youthful personal dimension of historical figures, ironically, that 230 may appeal to students' own experiences because of the remarkable educations in United States history, whether of Franklin, Abigail Adams, Lincoln, or W. E. B. Du Bois. From textbooks one gets little sense, for example, of what prep- aration and study John Adams, who collected constitutions as others collect postage stamps, underwent before proposing self-government to his fellow citizens. Citizenship requires a body of agreement, and "the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the sta- bility of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree" (Fish 1980, 338). Students are required to study American history because it constituted such an object, one that exemplified the bonds that arise through association and the forging of consensus. The nature of the history to be studied remains controversial, which may be a sign that its potential vitality still demands to be told, if not that in "areas such as social studies and literature . . . there is a deep conflict about what the right answers should be" (Friedenberg 1989, 90). Consensus, in other words, is vulnerable. A nation's ability to agree arises from its knowledge of its story of itself, a story that does not export and cannot stand imports. Textbooks cannot pro- duce citizens but merely reproduce a nation's collective 231 dream. "What the current texts say about the American Revolution or the Vietnam War may therefore have some impor- tance: though the memory of children may reduce much of it to white sound, some may remain as a tone of voice, a definition of the register" (FitzGerald 1980, 19). The fundamental curriculum question remains, "What is the knowledge of most worth?" Contemporary arguments about what to include in history textbooks all lead to a question almost as fundamental: at what point does repre- sentation of the diversity, dissent, and inequity in United States history vitiate the unity, consensus, and equity? The answer may reside with the historical figures who them- selves lived and successfully overcame a paradox: that consensus is born out of change, and leaders articulate it. That this legacy of paradox may already have been forgotten is only the greater reason to retrieve it for national memory, for without its remembrance and embodiment consti- tutional government will be powerless to confront its peren- nial dangers: officials will mistake poll results for lead- ership; citizens will confuse national interest with my- share-of-the-pie social theories and confuse moral choice with "the great determinisms of our times" (Kellner 1989, 226). 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