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Miseducation

A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad

edited by A. J. Angulo

Publication Date
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A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education.

Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American Publishers

Ignorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance—and its social production through naïveté, passivity, and active agency—at the center of many...

A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education.

Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American Publishers

Ignorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance—and its social production through naïveté, passivity, and active agency—at the center of many pivotal historical developments. Ignorance allowed Americans to maintain the institution of slavery, Nazis to promote ideas of race that fomented genocide in the 1930s, and tobacco companies to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. Today, ignorance enables some to deny the fossil record and others to ignore climate science.

A. J. Angulo brings together seventeen experts from across the scholarly spectrum to explore how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Each chapter identifies education as a critical site for advancing our still-limited understanding of what exactly ignorance is, where it comes from, and how it is diffused, maintained, and regulated in society.

Miseducation also challenges the notion that schools are, ideally, unimpeachable sites of knowledge production, access, and equity. By investigating how laws, myths, national aspirations, and global relations have recast and, at times, distorted the key purposes of education, this pathbreaking book sheds light on the role of ignorance in shaping ideas, public opinion, and policy.

Reviews

Reviews

... this volume makes an important contribution by prompting and inviting readers to take matters forward in their own engagement with the problem of ignorance. Even in titling the book "Miseducation" Angulo plants the seeds for exciting debate and discussion about what it might mean for historians to identify that which has been mis-educative across time and space — and on what grounds we are able to identify and understand this.

Original, fascinating, and exceptionally well done. The engaging essays in the book make a very important contribution to American history generally and the history of education in particular.

Nothing could be more important than miseducation. We live in a world where myth passes for truth and vice versa, thanks partly to our failure to study how ignorance is created, propagated, and sustained. As if we had medicine without pathology, or the study of law without the study of crime. This book is a healthy and welcome tonic!

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
384
ISBN
9781421419329
Illustration Description
3 halftones, 2 line drawings
Table of Contents

Ignorance 1
A. J. Angulo
PART I: Legalizing Ignorance
1 Slavery 13
Kim Tolley
2 Sex 34
Jennifer Burek Pierce and Matt Pierce
3 Sexuality 52
Karen Graves
4 Evolution 73
Adam R. Shapiro
5 Environment 96
Kevin C

Ignorance 1
A. J. Angulo
PART I: Legalizing Ignorance
1 Slavery 13
Kim Tolley
2 Sex 34
Jennifer Burek Pierce and Matt Pierce
3 Sexuality 52
Karen Graves
4 Evolution 73
Adam R. Shapiro
5 Environment 96
Kevin C. Elliott
PART II: Mythologizing Ignorance
6 Class 123
Daniel Perlstein
7 Identity 140
Eileen H. Tamura
8 Religion 161
Adam Laats
9 History 184
Donald Warren
PART III: Nationalizing and Globalizing Ignorance
10 US 217
Lisa Jarvinen
11 Germany 244
Lisa Pine
12 USSR 268
E. Thomas Ewing
13 Israel 295
Soli Vered and Daniel Bar- Tal
14 China 319
Dongping Han and Stephen Samuel Smith
Refl ections 339
A. J. Angulo
Acknowledgments 351
Contributors 355
Index 363

Author Bio