Among the objectives that Chapter 7 seeks to achieve are these:
This chapter should deepen and extend students' ability to think critically about the presuppositions underlying the structure and content of modern schooling, particularly at the secondary level.
Another objective is to critically examine how modern liberal commitments to such values as expert knowledge, meritocracy, and nationalism have influenced schooling in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Students should also think critically about the school as an instrument of national political policy in the political-economic context of the United States after World War II.
This chapter asks students to question the notion of a nationalist agenda for schooling within the context of democratic ideals so that the idea of "national interest" itself becomes problematic.
Students should consider a relatively recent historical instance of how an expressed commitment to democracy and equality can, in modern liberal schooling policy, serve students inequitably.
Students should also consider Van Doren's alternative approach to democratic education in contemporary society, one that is committed not to social or political outcomes, but to an ideal of human development applicable to all students.
This chapter can help examine the tendency to believe that the dominant way of thinking about school and society in a particular era was the only "sensible" approach, or that it was a necessary "product of the times" and therefore a consensus view.
