To my generation—the children of the fifties—these texts appeared permanent just because they were so self-contained. Their orthodoxy, it seemed, left no handholds for attack, no lodging for decay. Who, after all, would dispute the wonders of technology or the superiority of the English colonialists over the Spanish? Who would find fault with the pastorale of the West or the Old South? Who would question the anticommunist crusade? There was, it seemed, no point in comparing these visions with reality, since they were the public truth and were thus quite irrelevant to what existed and to what anyone privately believed. They were— or so it seemed—the permanent expression of mass culture in America.
对我们这些出生于50年代的人来说，这些教科书是恒定不变的，因为书中的事实根本毋庸置疑。历史书的正统观念看起来无懈可击，永不衰败。毕竟，有谁会怀疑技术带来的奇迹或英国殖民者相较两班牙殖民者的优势？有谁会否认昔日美国西部和南方田园牧歌般的时光？又有谁会质疑反共产主义的运动？似乎根本无须将书中的内容与现实去对比，因为这些是公认的真理，与现实无关，与个人意见无关。这些观点曾是美国大众文化的永恒体现——至少看起来是这样。
But now the texts have changed, and with them the country that American children are growing up into. The society that was once uniform is now a patchwork of rich and poor, old and young, men and women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Indians. The system that ran so smoothly by means of the Constitution under the guidance of benevolent conductor Presidents is now a rattletrap affair. The past is no highway to the present; it is a collection of issues and events that do not fit together and that lead in no single direction. The word “progress" has been replaced by the word "change": Children, the modern texts insist, should learn history so that they can adapt to the rapid changes taking place around them. History is proceeding in spite of us. The present, which was once portrayed in the concluding chapters as a peaceful haven of scientific advances and Presidential inaugurations, is now a tangle of problems: race problems, urban problems, foreign-policy problems, problems of pollution, poverty, energy depletion, youthful rebellion, assassination, and drugs. Some books illustrate these problems dramatically.
但是如今的教材已然变化，随之而变的还有孩子们成长后将要迈入的美国社会。曾经统一的社会如今成了一个个群体割据的大拼盘，富人与穷人，老人与年轻人，男人与女人，黑人、白人、西班牙裔人和印度裔人。美国社会过去依据宪法有章可循，依靠总统仁慈善为，闺家运转顺利，但是现在整个体系都变得破旧不堪、岌岌可危。过去不再是通往现在的一条通衢大道，而是一堆混杂在一起的事件，彼此互不相融、没有统一的方向。“进步”一词被“变化”所取代：现代的教科书认为，孩子们学习历史是为了更好地适应他们身边日新月异的变化。历史在前进，不以我们的意识为转移。以前的历史书在末尾章节总是会提到科学进步和总统大选，把当代社会描绘成宁静美好的天堂，但是如今的历史书总是以各种各样的问题结束：种族问题、城市问题、外交问题，以及污染、贫困、能源枯竭、青卷叛逆、暗杀、毒品等问题。一些书甚至以戏剧化的笔触来阐释这些问题。