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But beyond this knowledge there is still a hope for some reliable authority, for some fixed stars in the universe. We may know that journalists cannot be wholly unbiased and that "balance" is an imaginary point between two extremes, and yet we hope that Walter Cronkite will tell us the truth of things. In the same way, we hope that our history will not change—that we learned the truth of things as children. The texts, with their impersonal voices, encourage this hope, and therefore it is particularly disturbing to see how they change, and how fast.
但是在此认知之上，我们仍然希望读到的历史中能有一些可信度、一点权威性，就像我们希望星空中会有一些星星能恒久不变。我们都清楚记者无法做到完全的客观公正，所谓的“平衡”也只是位于两极之间的一个想象中的点，但我们仍然希望沃尔特·克朗凯特能够告诉我们事情的真相。同样，我们希望美国的历史是确定不变的，希望我们在孩提时学到的都是真实的。这种希望在教科书客观中立的口吻中得到鼓励，因此，我们尤其无法忍受看到教科书发生变化，而且变化如此之快。
Slippery history! Not every generation but every few years the content of American-history books for children changes appreciably. Schoolbooks are not, like trade books, written and left to their fate. To stay in step with the cycles of "adoption" in school districts across the country, the publishers revise most of their old texts or substitute new ones every three or four years. In the process of revision, they not only bring history up to date but make changes—often substantial changes—in the body of the work. History books for children are thus more contemporary than any other form of history. How should it be otherwise? Should students read histories written ten, fifteen, thirty years ago? In history, the system is reasonable—except that each generation of children reads only one generation of schoolbooks. The transient history is those children's history forever—their particular version of America.
多变的历史！不只是每隔一代人，而是每隔几年，孩子们的美国历史教科书的内容便会发生重大的变化。和大众读物不同，教科书不会写出来然后任其自生自灭。为了迎合全国各学区选用教材的周期，出版商们每隔三四年便要大规模修订一次教科书或者直接以新书取而代之。修订过程中，他们不仅更新最近的历史，而且会对书本主体进行修改——大幅修改。因而孩子们所用的历史教科书比其他任何形式记录的历史都要更具当代特色。不然又当如何呢？难道让孩子们去读十年、十五年，甚至三十年前所写的历史教科书？就历史而言，整个体系是合理的，但却没有考虑到每一代美国孩子只能读到一套教材，而这个短暂存在的版本就成为孩子们永恒不变的历史，决定了他们如何理解自己的国家。
