问答题 Comparative historian Marc Ferro claims that the largest discrepancy in knowledge between what academic historians and what the average citizen knows about history is found in the United States. How has this situation come about? Certainly the problem does not lie with the secondary literature. Whereas in the past, American historians were handicapped by secondary literature that was clearly biased towards a European viewpoint, since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the secondary literature in American history has become far more comprehensive. And it cannot be simply a matter of space constraints: the average high school history textbook is well over a thousand pages in length.
One theory holds that American history textbooks are simply the socializing instruments of a controlling elite. The stratification of American society is preserved, according to this theory, by the creation of what Marx termed "false consciousness. " The theory holds that the way people think about their society and their history is crucial to maintaining the status quo. If the power elites come to believe that their success is the deserved product of their hard work and ingenuity, then there will be no desire to change the system. Similarly, if the lower classes are taught that their plight is solely due to their failings, they will be more likely to accept their fate and less likely to rise up in revolution. Griffin and Marciano contend that history textbooks promote nothing more than hegemony.
Many educational theorists share this viewpoint, which in their discipline is often known as critical theory. Proponents of this view, including Kozol, Freire, and Giroux, argue that the dominant classes would never create or foster an educational system that taught subordinate classes how to critically evaluate society and the injustices it contains. As long as schools serve to transmit culture, the power elite will never allow any real reform in the system.