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...rather, it has been privatized--entrusted to commercial publishers. This circumstance seems to be the result of an unholy alliance between education schools, publishers, and state departments of education. Professors of history and of English, be they old-fashioned or avant-garde, are not a part of this alliance, and they have tended to ignore the whole business of K-12 education. (Mathematicians and natural scientists, by contrast, have played a large role in America's schools since World War II, often with strong support from the National Science Foundation.)
The current situation is by no means unprecedented. At the turn of the last century, the American Book Company, in league with the emerging education profession, cornered the textbook market. Over time, the situation worsened: Ravitch's examples are even more appalling than those described twenty years ago by Frances FitzGerald in America Revised (1979), her pathbreaking history of history textbooks.
Most K-12 history textbooks are unreadable. And who could possibly discover a fictive world worth knowing in the "literary" selections described by Ravitch?
Of course, students should read books that challenge them, that introduce them to times, places, and experiences novel and provocative to them. More than anything, as Ravitch insists, they should experience intellectual freedom and the intellectual adventure that it promises. The curriculum should connect with the world students know, but carry them beyond it, enabling them to develop what Ravitch elegantly calls a "sympathetic imagination." Neither the schools that most children attend...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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