ABSTRACT
Part of the role of common schools, according to Mann and his supporters, was to good habits and quality traits like respect for authority, punctuality, and manners, via general and common curricula. "Education" is the broadest conceptual category and is neither limited to formal or institutional settings, nor does its value rely upon its utility or practicality. Reducing the diversity of values in a pluralistic society to those values that sell best means that consumer materialism is at work in textbook adoption and use. Curriculum decisions are similar to the "given-ness" of textbooks. Georgia, for example, has a Quality Core Curriculum that stipulates for teachers the content of their courses. Teachers acquiesce to such subordinate roles, in part, because the culture of teaching was fashioned early in their professional lives, usually as undergraduate or master's-degree students.
