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Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad edited by A. J. Angulo Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. 374 pp. $32.95 (paper).
Research, policy, and practice in the educational field typically focus on concepts like learning and knowledge. We create standards to designate what students ought to know and investigate the methods and materials best suited to facilitate their learning of it. We study how to create classrooms, schools, and out-of-school opportunities that support learning and disentangle the demographic, social, relational, systemic, and myriad other factors that predict various learning outcomes. However, as editor A. J. Angulo argues in the commentary framing the edited volume Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad, education scholarship has just as much to gain from a focus on what might be deemed the antithesis of knowledge: ignorance. In other words, what is it that people do not know? And, more critically, what misinformation do they know? What have they learned that is actually wrong?
Angulo argues that ignorance is a societal inevitability manifested in diverse forms that may be perpetuated or even actively constructed through processes of miseducation and, in doing so, situates the book within an emerging field of study: agnotology, or the study of ignorance. Although historian Robert Proctor (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008) introduced the term in 2008, agnotology's conceptual roots extend back further. Angulo draws on Carter G. Woodson's works, including Miseducation of the Negro (1933), which raised concerns about how schools were actively miseducating African Americans, neglecting their needs, and hobbling their preparedness to succeed later in life. Angulo then uses Bernard Bailyn's (1960) definition of education as a process of cultural transmission in order to broaden Woodson's conception of miseducation. In this context, education-or miseducation-is a broader phenomenon that occurs in and around schools through various media and mechanisms and that is not just for formal students but for all people.
The fourteen chapters in this edited volume describe ignorance according to Proctor's three-stage frame-naive, passive, or active ignorance-with a particular focus on the last. When we describe ignorance as the blank slate on which we inscribe knowledge, we are thinking of naive ignorance, the "absence of knowledge" (p. 5). Passive ignorance results from instances where we "limit what we...