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Politics and Historical Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Daniel Perlstein
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Extract

When I ask students in my educational history and policy courses about the 1954 Brown decision and more broadly about the idea of integration, they recognize that desegregation might be a good strategy to equalize resources but add indignantly that black children certainly do not need to sit next to whites in order to learn. Students of color tend to be more critical of integration than whites, but all have as much difficulty imagining a good integrated school as a good segregated one; all have difficulty imagining the social vision that fueled demands for integration.

Type
Symposium
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 101 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Armento, Beverly et al., A More Perfect Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 601.Google Scholar

2 Armento, A More Perfect Union, 602–8.Google Scholar

3 Valenzuela, Angela Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).Google Scholar

4 For the last decade, American historians have engaged in a lively debate about the impact of the Brown decision on school desegregation and on the civil rights movement. See for instance Gerald N. Rosenberg The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar

5 In forcing students to choose between their own experience of American racism and the official truth that American institutions are racially equitable, the textbook reflects a wider dilemma faced by black students. It suggests why “acting white” in order to succeed in school is particularly burdensome for black youth. See Fordham, Signithia “Racelessness as a Factor in Black Students’ School Success: Pragmatic Strategy or Pyrrhic Victor)?“ Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 54–84.Google Scholar

6 Wineburg, Sam “On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy,” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991): 495–519. A More Perfect Union's insistence on students’ unquestioning acceptance of authority mirrors disciplinary and pedagogical practices common in schools, as well as broader political trends. Students’ belief that history textbooks like A More Perfect Union are more trustworthy than original documents reflects their experience of these demands that they submit to authority, no matter how wrong or biased. On the politics of constructivism, see Perlstein, Daniel “Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics, Pedagogy, and the African American Freedom Straggle,” American Educational Research Journal 39 (Summer 2002): 249–277.Google Scholar

7 Chapin, June et al., Quest for Liberty (San Francisco: Field Educational Publications, 1971), 625–27, 632.Google Scholar