In this article, Campbell Scribner applies insights from history, philosophy, and reader theory to marginal inscriptions in nineteenth-century textbooks, providing a conjectural explanation of student boredom during the period. He contends that boredom was a dialectic and contingent experience, based on shifting notions of childhood and education,…

In this review essay, Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe explore the history of the culture wars in public education in the United States. Drawing on three books--David Tyack's "Seeking Common Ground," Jonathan Zimmerman's "Whose America?" and Amy Binder's "Contentious Curricula"--Kantor and Lowe review the history of…