Volume 26, Number 20 · December 20, 1979
Playing Hooky
By C. Vann Woodward
America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century
by Frances FitzGerald
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 240 pp., $9.95
Apart from obscenities, the most deprecatory adjective in the vocabulary of youth in 1969 was the word 'irrelevant.' In that year a study of a hundred representative secondary schools showed that of the twenty-one subjects in their curriculum on which they were questioned, the students regarded American history as the 'most irrelevant.' What they meant was that they found it the dullest or the most boring. The planners of their curriculums and selectors of their textbooks would seem to have shared the aversion of the students, since the time and attention given American history have diminished and the texts have not improved.
Review, 2435 words
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