Description
By undertaking to educate every single American child all the way through high school, the United States has set for itself a goal unrivaled by any other country in the world. However, this goal has run full tilt into a heated debate about what diverse children are taught about history, language and literature. The book attempts to provide the historical context of the struggle for diverse curricula in American public schools. The author offers a look at how educational goals have changed over the last century, as well as a prescription for how they must continue to change through the millennium if the aim of fully educating the poorest quarter of the nation is to be achieved. She also provides an overview of the multicultural-education debate – of the formation and reformation of the canon, the call for a return to basics, and the politics of inclusion. She ends with an argument for a diverse curriculum that reflects the national experiment in educating all citizens through high school – for changing the “what” and “how” of education to engage the new “whom”.
