America’s Schools Are Less Divided Than You Think

In August of 2022, a resident of Denton, Texas, appeared before his school board to demand the removal of a salacious library book. He read aloud passages from the novel describing detailed sexual acts. But the book he was reading from, Love Lies Beneath , wasn’t actually available in the school district’s libraries. He had confused the sexy psychological thriller with Lies Beneath , a young-adult novel about mermaids. At the time, Mark Hlavacik was a professor at the local university in Denton. In his new book, Willing Warriors , Hlavacik argues that the episode epitomizes how culture wars have distorted the politics of education in the United States. Since at least the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a Tennessee high-school teacher was accused of violating a law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, Americans have argued about school curricula. But from the 1980s until the end of the Obama years, a bipartisan focus on achievement, as measured by standardized-test scores, was largely “keeping the lid” on these educational culture wars, Hlavacik writes. The lid came off with the 2015 repeal of the No Child Left Behind Act, which had rated and rewarded schools based on those scores. Now, he concludes, it’s culture wars all the way down. Willing Warriors - A New History Of The Education Culture Wars By Mark Hlavacik Buy Book Instead of trying to improve students’ reading and math skills, Hlavacik writes, schools have become theaters of political drama and control. Each side tries to impose its dogmas upon the classroom, following what he classifies as two basic scripts: exposé and innovation. First, someone, like the objecting citizen in Denton, warns that a dangerous force is corrupting the schools. Then they put forth a plan to transform education, promising to substitute their own wisdom for the ignorance of the crowd. Ironically, Hlavacik’s book traffics in the same dynamic he decries: It’s an exposé of the many ways that the exposé script warps education. And I fear that he, too, might have distorted the actual dangers facing our schools. American teachers, for the most part, are much more concerned with student learning and behavior than they are with complaints from angry parents or others in their community about divisive issues, which— as my own research shows —rarely enter our classrooms. Although perhaps, in fact, they should, because every classroom culture battle reflects a real division in our society. Schools shouldn’t be insulated spaces that shield their students from debate; they should prepare young people to communicate with those who might disagree with them. Read: Tell students the truth about American history In a 2024 American Historical Association survey of more than 3,000 middle- and high-school history teachers in nine different states, just 2 percent said they “frequently” faced “objections or criticisms” about their instruction, and 45 percent said they had never received an objection. This is not overwhelming evidence that schools are free from political interference: English teachers have been the target of public attacks in...

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