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rest of the advanced nations. The existence in the United States of the
development of world-class science and technology, achieved in this
century by the work of millions, is an historic fact of real importance -
quite apart from and in addition to the effects on society. (A similar but
less severe case can be made against the treatment of the arts, to which
that document pays attention in a quite slanted and narrowly selective
way.)
The most responsible attempt in the history standards document ap–
pears on the page before the very end: "Students should be able to
demonstrate understanding of the modem American economy by . . .
evaluating the importance of scientific and technological change on the
workplace and productivity." A few examples of students' achievements
intended to meet such standards are given on that page. But apart from
appearing very late in the implied curriculum, the examples are entirely
preoccupied with the "effects of' or "impacts of' technologies, rather
than establishing first their existence and how they came into our history
in the first place. As one observer noted (in
The History Newsletter of the
American Institute
if
Physics):
"Science is [here] implicitly viewed as some–
thing which has descended from elsewhere... . Technology, too , is
treated as an external body which 'impacts' upon society.... An entire
standard devoted to 'the second industrial revolution' is concerned solely
with how it 'changed the nature and conditions of work,' for example in
the employment of children." And he adds, "The proposed standards
represent the current thought of a cross-section of leaders in American
primary and secondary education in academic history. Evidently if stu–
dents are to learn what society has done in the past to nurture science,
how science has affected the development of technology, and where sci–
entific thought had stood within American culture, in the future as in the
past, they should not look to the typical high school history course."
A glance through the published volume shows how uncomfortably
true this critique is. Thus an example of student activity is to "examine
the influence of MTV on popular culture," with a special question posed:
"How does Madonna symbolize the popular culture created by MTV?"
Madonna and MTV may be of historic importance; but how did televi–
sion itself come to be? And what about the telegraph, the telephone,
radio, video, the laser, and the transistor, all surely known to students, and
whose economic impacts have been vast? Would it not be helpful to put
a little of the story of their American sources into the Standards for
United States History, the more so as we are now in the Information
Age?
The producers of these history standards have explained that they did
not want to make lists of people, since this may be the job of the ultimate
