| Based on ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation studies the way that American philosophies of liberal democracy become encoded into the everyday social life of adolescents, shaping and limiting the ways in which American teenagers understand their life experiences and create a lived relationship to the idea of being American. From this base, it considers how education as practiced in the United States has operated and continues to operate as an adaptive system for social continuity and change. It further explores the ways this system relates to the history of creating and maintaining an American nation-state. |