The study of ignorance-making – or the “social construction of ignorance” – received a major boost in 2008 with the publication of Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger's groundbreaking essay collection Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Those twelve essays explored ignorance in areas such as censorship, climate science, the fossil record, genetics, orgasms, race, etc. One major, and surprising, topic missed was education. Despite that exclusion, contributions by Proctor and Michael Smithson, in particular, provided theoretical perspectives and terminology that would enable future work in other topics.

In A. J. Angulo's new collection, Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad, all eighteen authors use Agnotology as either a direct or indirect starting point. This begins in Angulo's introduction, where he cites Proctor's categories of native, passive, and active ignorance. Those are, respectively, youthful naivety, the personal selection and limiting of knowledge, and finally “the active construction, maintenance, regulation, and diffusion” of ignorance (5–6). This final category preoccupies the contributors to Miseducation. It is worth noting that the authors focus on the negative attributes and vices of ignorance – as opposed to deliberate “virtuous ignorance” (e.g. unethical human research, ignorance of killing techniques) or John Rawls's “veil of ignorance” thought construct.

Angulo groups the fourteen contributor essays into three categories: “Legalizing Ignorance” (five essays), “Mythologizing Ignorance” (four), and “Nationalizing and Globalizing Ignorance” (five). Put another way, these sections may be seen, respectively, as de jure ignorance-making, de facto, and a mix of both. In those sections the essays cover miseducation in the contexts of slavery; sexuality; evolution; the environment; class identity; ethnic identity; religion (i.e. Christian textbooks); education; historiography; American imperialism; Nazi Germany; and the state ideologies of the Soviet Union, Israel, and China. Those essays are sandwiched between brief introductory and conclusory essays by Angulo.

The following choices betray more about this reviewer's interests and expectations, but I particularly appreciated these pieces: Adam Shapiro on antievolutionism in the classroom; Adam Laats on evangelical textbooks and cultural occlusion, Lisa Pine on the Third Reich's everyday efforts to promote ideology and myth through censorship and miseducation, and Soli Vered and Daniel Bar-Tal on conflict-support narrative themes and methods in Israeli education. These essays stood out for their power and subtlety. But all the essays, together, enrich the historiography of education. In Angulo's words, they “reinvigorate well-established lines of research” and “circle back” to refine “agnotological methods” (339).

Although approaching the problem of ignorance from the angle of “social construction” removes agency from those affected, that is also its virtue. The Angulo collection avoids blaming the victims. This is particularly important in the realm of school-based education, where there can be no Menckenesque, misanthropic diatribes about buffoons or poor choices when the curricula and participation are involuntary (courtesy of mandatory attendance policies). Miseducation and the Proctor–Schiebinger collection contribute to a scholarly empathy and tone in ignorance studies that has eluded prior studies of anti-intellectualism broadly conceived (e.g. Richard Hofstadter's class Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008)).

The weaker pieces in Miseducation merely graft agnotology into their narratives. References occur at the beginning and/or end of the story, with little sense of how the theory or philosophy of ignorance-making changes the narrative. It is not that those weaker pieces are unrelated, but they are less sophisticated than those noted above. The volume also suffers from the lack of a clear line, theoretically, between schooling and adult education. Children, adolescents, young adults, and fully mature adults are miseducated differently – from different sources, venues, and institutions. Many pieces would have benefited from exploring those differences in the time periods addressed. But perhaps that is a topic for a future ignorance-making study. Finally, and this problem is acknowledged in Angulo's final essay, few essayists make explicit their judgments about the fuzzy “boundary between knowledge and ignorance” (341). This reviewer acknowledges that certain fundamental ethical and moral considerations determine those boundaries (e.g. scientific study, civil and human rights, ethics of reciprocity), but few authors in the volume made their commitments explicit. While it is true, in Angulo's words, that “all knowledge is political,” it is also true that not all politics are merely subjective.

Despite those weaknesses, this groundbreaking volume belongs on the shelves of every library in higher education that serves and helps train education students. All educators will benefit from both an acquaintance and sustained engagement with Miseducation.