Education: For Better Citizens

Nobody can learn to be a good citizen by studying a textbook. But textbooks have something to do with it. And the quality of U. S. school textbooks depends to a considerable degree on an earnest group of 3,000—members of the National Council for the Social Studies. They are the people who write most of the history for school children, devise courses of study in history, civics, economics, geography, sociology. They take their jobs and themselves seriously. Distressed but not daunted by evidence that, in spite of their textbooks (and the field investigations...