Remembering the Present is the Past Writ Large

Abstract

In the second decade of the new millennium, the Texas Board of Education adopts new textbook standards in history that exclude commonly held beliefs about the United States and the vox populi shouts its discord. The California Board of Education adopts new history standards acknowledging the role of gay/lesbian figures in the United States and different voices are equally cacophonous in their discord. Not enough voices are asking questions such as “what is the origin of this discord?” and “Where did the passion over what America’s youth are reading come from?” Social reconstructionist educator Theodore Brameld began his 1945 work Design for America admonishingly saying, “The schools by and large seem to have forgotten that time consists of three dimensions rather than merely two” (p. 2).