ABSTRACT
This brief survey suggests that in both English and American secondary schools, history instruction plays a prominent part in the ‘syllabus’ (as the British would put it) or ‘curriculum’ (as the Americans would say). It also suggests that history teachers in Grammar and Secondary Modern schools in England and Wales are better equipped to select, use, and dispute textbooks than their counterparts in the United States. Nearly all in the Grammar schools, and some in the Secondary Modern schools, are university graduates with degrees in history, while the non university graduates who teach history in Secondary Modern schools have probably done a specialist course in the subject (in addition to a course in method) at a Teachers’ Training College. In the United States, in contrast, the history teacher at the Junior High school level teaches at least two subjects, and only rarely can be judged to have an expert knowledge of history. Even in High school, where the history teacher usually confines himself to that subject (except in a few schools whose admini strators believe that anyone knows American history and delegates its teaching to the basketball coach or the Latin instructor whose enrollment is insufficient to keep him busy), training has been more often in methodology than subject matter. Teachers with such scant knowledge of their discipline will be more inclined to lean heavily on a textbook, and to sanctify it as the gospel, than will teachers in England and Wales who may use a text only as a foil for the expression of their own views.
