In over 30 years of graduate and undergraduate teaching, I have taught everything from large introductory offerings with an audience of 300, to advanced undergraduate seminars, even a graduate course for two people on writing about archaeology. In all these years, I am struck by two constants: the general enthusiasm of my students for archaeology and their startling lack of ability to think for themselves and be intellectually self-reliant, something found in every academic discipline. These same 30 years have encompassed a period of remarkable change in archaeology-new theoretical paradigms, the increasing emphasis on stewardship and management, startling and sometimes dramatic discoveries, and a quantum jump in our ability to extract fine-grained information from the archaeological record. Yet, every winter, when I step into the classroom to address another audience of impressionable undergraduates, I find everything is the same. The expectations of my colleagues and students, the university regulations surrounding testing and scoring, the questions students ask, even the distinctive aroma in the classroom on a wet day.

Education, a primary mode for transmitting society's knowledge, values and beliefs, is a highly political endeavour. To understand fully the place of archaeology within the framework of public education in the United States, some background in the broader political landscape and sanctioned curricula in American schools is necessary. This article examines some key aspects of these issues, including governmental control of education, the ‘history of history’ in schools, and the appropriation of the past. It also looks at the status of archaeology education in the United States and considers an appropriate role for pre-college archaeology.

In Ireland I think it could be said that while archaeology plays an important role in national identity, this role is implicit and not very welldefined. Images of monuments in mist or glorious sunshine and artefacts displayed as treasure or jewellery are very widely deployed. This constructed past serves a variety of different purposes for a rapidly changing present, from utilization as a symbol of the long tradition of Ireland's high technological expertise — nowadays being best expressed in the computing industry, as a backdrop for the sustained (as opposed to sustainable) drive to increase tourism, to the context for a call of a revitalization of Celtic spirituality (see discussion in Gibbons 1996). More traditionally, of course, material remains played a very important role in the construction of national identities in Ireland (e.g. Crooke 1999). For these varied reasons archaeology is seen in a positive light, as a positive project, both by political decision-makers and the public. One illustration of this is the Discovery Programme, a government-funded research initiative set up in 1991 to enhance knowledge of Ireland’s past through integrated programmes of archaeological research (Waddell 1997; Eogan 1998).

As cultural resource management (CRM) in the United States struggles through another period of introspection, one need for improvement consistently identified is in the area of graduate training of future practitioners of CRM archaeology (Fagan 1996; Green & Doershuk 1998; Schuldenrein 1998; Messenger et al. 1999). To what extent training in the practicalities of the field needs to be embodied in curricular coursework, the relative role of research versus applied emphases in the graduate programme, the most appropriate terminal degree for CRM practice, and the very specifics of what constitutes adequate preparation for the diverse and dynamic challenges that constitute contemporary archaeology in the United States, all provide points for the emerging discussion between professionals operating in the field and those in academia who design programmes (e.g. Society for American Archaeology 1995).

Archaeology in Britain is going through one of its periodic ‘crises’, but for once it is not a crisis of funding, but one rather brought on by success, with more money, more posts and more archaeology. Much of the new money emanates from Developer Funding; PPG-16 (DoE 1990), brought out by the Department of the Environment in the wake of a European Directive on the need to conserve the historic environment, requires developers, where possible, to preserve archaeological sites, and where not, to preserve by record, i.e. to excavate. Roles were split with, on the one side, local government having ‘curatorial responsibility’ to maintain Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) and to advise on planning and development; and on the other, independent ‘archaeological units’ to carry out the work.

Most archaeologists start with the premise that the more people who know about archaeology the better. When challenged to justify this premise they have a number of responses ranging from the conservative ‘to know more is to understand more’, or the conservational ‘to preserve our heritage’, to the enlightened self-interest of ‘public knowledge or interest means public spending’ and thus the preservation of the archaeologist as well as of the archaeological record. Whatever the justification there is no consensus about how to enable people to know more, let alone a general agreement about what should be known, given that all human activity in the past lies within the scope of archaeological enquiry. There is, however, an assumption that to be effective we should capture the interest of the young and therefore that knowledgeable teachers will produce a knowledgeable future public.