Promotional Information

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. -- William J. Reese, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History 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! -- Robert N. Proctor, author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

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. 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

About the Author

A. J. Angulo is a professor of education and faculty affiliate in the Department of History and Global Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of Empire and Education: A History of Greed and Goodwill from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror and Diploma Mills: How For-Profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream.

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.
—Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation