It’s possible we’ll resolve these specific conflicts, settling into an embittered ceasefire like the onefor older disagreements over sex education, the teaching of evolution, and prayer on campus. Yet we are naive if we think we’ll figure this out in some broader sense—that America’s public school culture wars will ever really end.
The centrality of public schools to the definition and inculcation of American identity makes them an inevitable point of friction in a country as divided as our own. But public schools are also “America’s chief public institution for distilling and delivering moral values to its young,” as education historian Jonathan Zimmerman writes inall want the same things. “Schools across the globe teach the glories of nationhood, linking children to a set of transcendent events and ideals,” Zimmerman observes.ideals? Beyond math and literacy, music and sports, Americans’ visions of a good education diverge widely. They always will.
That is, unless something changes—something big and presently implausible. Such a change could come on the educational side. Most optimistically, as Zimmerman
Simple: the Constitution and literacy
Since covid home schooling has exploded. By over 300% just in Utah. It’s terrifying.