ABSTRACT
Which knowledge, or whose knowledge, is of most worth in any given place and time? Researchers from a wide range of disciplines – and even the US State Department, which employs people to observe textbooks worldwide – consider school textbooks a unique resource to explore this question. Textbooks are one of the few media which are explicitly oriented to shaping the values, knowledges and subjectivities of the future generation. Textbooks result from a complex production process involving myriad institutions and individuals. Since this process involves multiple compromises among sometimes very different perspectives, textbooks reflect and co-constitute what is collectively accepted as sayable in a given time/space. At the same time, public debates have raged over which knowledges textbooks ‘should’ offer students.
