| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society. By David Tyack. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 237 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-674-01198-8.)
Seeking Common Ground is David Tyack's effort to explore the ways in which Americans throughout our history have used the schools to reconcile their desire for social cohesion with the demands of democracy. These efforts have, he argues, been punctuated by conflicts surrounding certain reoccurring themes, specifically, unity, diversity, and democracy. In this small volume, Tyack explores a number of specific conflicts involving these themes to consider what they tell us about our "search for common ground amid controversy and ethnoreligious diversity" (p. 183).	1
The six chapters that make up the book treat such issues as citizenship education, the writing of history textbooks, the assimilative role of the school, the teaching of low-achieving children, school governance, and school choice. There have been, he notes, a number of conflicts that have resulted over time in our efforts to use the schools to construct a unified society. These disputes first appeared on the scene when we sought to use education to transform British colonists into Americans. They also have appeared in later periods in our attempts to use schools to Americanize various immigrant groups and to integrate Native Americans into the larger society.	. . .

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