Public education and political discourse: Classroom histories of the Cold War

This study is an examination of popular representations of the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States and the world, and how these representations are perpetuated through schooling. It attempts to make explicit the social and cultural processes through which teachers and students use textbooks and other educational and popular materials to construct their knowledge of the cold war and their images of the United States and the Soviet Union as international actors.;Data gathering involved the observation and audio-taping of lessons on the cold war and world affairs in three United States history classes and one world affairs class in two high schools in the San Diego Unified School District. Transcripts of these lessons were used to examine the metaphors and modes of representation teachers and students use in talking about the cold war and the international behavior of the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, analysis of transcripts of these lessons illuminated how representations of historical figures and events in textbooks and other classroom materials make their way into teachers' and students' political discourse.;Teachers' and students' view the Russians as being inherently expansionist, and Russian expansionism as being the driving force behind the cold war. As a result of this teachers and students are inattentive to contextual features when representing containment events involving Russian expansionism. They focus on Russian actions rather than the interactions between the Soviet Union and other nations, since they know that Russian behavior is not a response to that of other nations but rather the expression of this inherent Russian need to expand.;This decontextualization of containment events provides students with a history of the cold war which encourages them to view Russian expansionism as being a constant and enduring feature of Soviet foreign policy, a perpetual threat to the postwar world. Public belief in the Soviet threat, therefore, is not perpetuated through schooling by teaching students to hate the Russians, but rather through the construction of a decontextualized history of the cold war which encourages students to view the Soviets as an ahistorical threat.