Conclusion

Abstract

When I began writing this book, I was a university professor in the United States. The process of researching and writing this book, however, compelled me to leave academia for a high-school teaching position. Inspired by the work of Rethinking Schools and troubled by my students’ inability to think critically or in an interdisciplinary manner, I decided that I wanted to reach younger students. It is in schools, not in universities, where students are taught how to think and how to question. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of education. In the United States, we are failing to properly prepare students not only for university, but also for the world they inhabit. Given the power the United States wields globally, the inability of students to understand their own country’s history alongside and in relation to other countries is catastrophic. Howard Zinn notes that one of the greatest failures of the American educational system is “the failure to understand the relations between the United States and other countries in the world, that is, American foreign policy.” As a result, Zinn remarks, “The educational system brings up whole generations of American[s] who do not understand what we have done to other countries … what this does is it leads Americans to accept uncritically what their government tells them about current foreign policy.”¹