RONALD W. EVANS PATRICIA G. AVERY PATRICIA VELDE PEDERSON

Selection of subject matter in social studies has long been a concern of educational theorists and reformers. Over the history of social studies, many prominent thinkers have advocated curricular reform with greater emphasis on in-depth study of public or controversial issues ( Engle and Ochoa 1988; Evans and Saxe 1996; Hunt and Metcalf 1955; Oliver and Shaver 1966; Rugg 1921 ). Despite the best intentions of social studies reformers over the years, a traditional, textbook-centered, fact-mythlegend approach to teaching history has continued to dominate the social studies curriculum ( Goodlad 1984; Hertzberg 1981; Shaver, Davis, and Helburn 1979; Wilen and White 1991). Previous attempts to explain the failure of issuescentered social studies reform have focused on rational explanation: the realities of schools as tenacious

RONALD W. EVANS is a professor in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University in California. PATRICIA G. AVERY is an associate professor of social stuidies education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. PATRICIA VELDE PEDERSON is a senior assessment specialist at Harcourt Educational Measurement in San Antonio. Texas.

bureaucracies resistant to change; the dominant influence of social studies textbooks on classroom discourse; and the basically conservative orientation of social studies teachers toward content and discussion, owing in part to the mode of education they experienced as students in schools and universities ( Gross 1989; Onosko 1996; Shaver 1989). We believe a cultural analysis may shed some additional light on the process by which subject matter in social studies remains relatively constant and controversial materials and issues are de-emphasized or omitted.

Although the focus of this article is on examining a major restraint on teaching social issues, we hope that the reader will not interpret this as a swan song for issues-centered education. Instead, it is intended as an attempt to understand cultural obstacles and to approach them realistically, with eyes wide open, and thus to build hope for significant progress in the field. We must fully understand the obstacles to issues-centered education before we can hope to overcome them.

From an anthropological perspective, controversial issues and topics receive little attention in schools because in the culture of schooling, and the culture of society, many controversial topics and issues are taboo. Taboo or tabu is a Polynesian word that means a general ban on a specific object, which should not be touched. For the purposes of this study, taboos may be defined as beliefs that constrain actions by making certain behaviors and discussion of certain topics forbidden or discouraged. Thus, taboo topics are those that social studies topics teachers may choose to avoid or de-emphasize because of their perceptions or beliefs regarding the sensitivity of the topic. Noa is the Polynesian word that has a meaning opposite from that taboo. The noa topics in social studies are topics teachers generally perceive as proper for discussion in local cultures.

Those topics do not threaten the belief system of the culture ( McGinnis 1992). "When society was simply structured and static, taboos were important because their goal was to preserve the status quo. Breaking a taboo often brought about punishment, danger, or ostracism from society" ( Mann 1984 , 10). Taboos are the "permitted and the prohibited, the do's and the don'ts" and are "developed by society for its members out of self-preservative, tradition enhancing motives" ( Farberow 1963 , 1-2). In social studies education, taboos represent the traditional--the attitudes and actions of times past. Brown ( 1984 )

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