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
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.
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 recent years for teaching certain controversial novels, and more than two-thirds of high-school principals in a 2022 survey reported “substantial political conflict” with parents and community members. And the AHA poll was taken before Donald Trump regained the White House and issued an executive order barring “radical, anti-American ideologies” from schools.
But the survey—which its authors call the most comprehensive study of history instruction in the past 50 years—underscores a more immediate concern: not enough instructional time with students and not enough professional training for teachers. You might imagine that the repeal of No Child Left Behind freed teachers from onerous bureaucratic constraints. But that’s not what they report, because states and school districts continue to lard them with additional curriculum requirements. In Wyoming, for example, teachers must address the history of cowboys and cowgirls; in Louisiana, they are charged with presenting Francophone heritage. Throw in whatever reform du jour their districts have embraced—social and emotional learning, personalized instruction, and so on—and teachers have less and less time for each topic they need to cover. They’re generally not worried about losing their jobs to an angry mob of anti-woke parents; they’re worried about doing their jobs well and doing right by their students.
Yet Hlavacik is also right, over the long term, about the many ways that culture wars inflame—and distort—educational politics. He starts his story in the 1970s, with the fracas over Man: A Course of Study. The brainchild of Jerome Bruner, an eminent cognitive psychologist, this curriculum aimed to introduce children to the essential questions of life: what makes us human, and how we can become more so. One of its units focused on the Netsilik, an Inuit nation in the Canadian Arctic that was once reported to have practiced senicide (the killing or abandonment of the elderly). Films that accompanied the curriculum also showed the Netsilik disemboweling a seal and carving up a caribou.
These details caught the attention of several right-wing journalists and eventually a GOP congressman, who claimed that the course was anti-Christian and pro-Communist. That was absurd. But the implementation of Man: A Course of Study was also flawed. For one, its funder, the National Science Foundation, buried several negative reports that the course received from a peer review. Nothing about this story was black-and-white. But culture wars tend to reduce every conflict to a simple morality play, as Hlavacik repeatedly shows.
Two decades later, another national school-curriculum drama played out, this time over history. As Hlavacik writes, in 1994, a team that included academic historians and secondary-school history teachers released a proposed set of standards that included scholarship about long-neglected groups in American history, especially Black people and women. According to the talk-show impresario Rush Limbaugh, they distorted history by ignoring or denigrating significant figures such as the Founding Fathers. No federal agency ever adopted the standards, which were eventually rejected in the Senate.
Likewise, when Barack Obama’s administration proposed a “Common Core” curriculum to replace the different state standards promulgated under No Child Left Behind, political commentators such as Glenn Beck accused educators and testing companies that had come out in support of the plan of conspiring with the White House to impose mind control upon America. To some of its critics, Common Core was a malicious plot masquerading as an innovation.
And as states started to abandon Common Core, school controversies began to focus less on standards and achievement than on competing understandings of America itself. That’s the focus of Hlavacik’s final chapter, about “The 1619 Project,” which triggered one of the most polarizing culture wars in contemporary American education. Appearing first as a series of articles in The New York Times Magazine, and then adapted into history curricula around the country, “The 1619 Project” sought to revise readers’ understanding of the nation’s history by rooting it in slavery rather than in founding principles such as equality and freedom. In response, some on the right charged that the Times and its allies in academia were negatively misrepresenting American history. (The project was also controversial among some academic historians, who disputed a number of its claims.)
As Hlavacik demonstrates, “The 1619 Project” itself participated in the rhetoric of exposé: depicting America as a fount of oppression rather than liberty, it also indicted schools for neglecting a full accounting of discomfiting chapters of our past. It is true, as the “1619 Project” contributor Nikita Stewart noted, that some popular history textbooks have given short shrift to slavery. But most history teachers in the U.S. no longer rely upon a textbook for daily instruction. They draw on a wide range of other sources, and they certainly address topics like slavery. A USA Today report found, too, that across the country, teachers are discussing difficult subject matter with nuance and presenting varied perspectives on the country’s history. Some teachers’ lessons might lack sophistication or depth, but the idea that schools are neglecting or ignoring slavery is probably overstated.
So, too, is the notion that our schools are racked by culture wars. Most schools, according to the AHA survey, present American history as a slow but steady march toward fulfilling our founding ideals. As the authors of that report found, history teachers are generally committed “to teaching both inspirational and unsettling histories.” Perhaps Trump’s actions—combined with state laws barring “divisive” concepts from the classroom—will bring an end to that, forcing teachers to avoid or downplay the ugly parts of our past. But for now, a rough consensus seems to hold sway. Culture warriors routinely distract people from the ideas and practices that Americans share in most classrooms around the country. We live in a deeply polarized society, so it’s hardly a surprise that schools—like other institutions—have become targets of political division and controversy. When you drill down into the schools themselves, however, you are likely to find more agreement than dissent.
In an earlier book, Hlavacik decried the Obama-era consensus on testing and accountability, which he argued exaggerated the deficiencies of American education and blamed schools and teachers for them. As his new volume shows, that bipartisan accord on boosting test scores is largely gone—at a time when we need it more than ever, given recent reports about low academic achievement. But this moment also offers an opportunity to encourage democratic deliberation in schools. Despite the recent boom in homeschooling—and the rapid growth of voucher systems, which provide public dollars for private schools—most Americans continue to patronize their local public schools. These battered but venerable institutions still represent our most promising vehicle for teaching young people how to communicate across the issues that divide us. Instructors can learn from the example of Idaho English teacher Kam Walters, who assigned the report put out by Trump’s 1776 Commission in addition to “The 1619 Project” and told students to “weigh the arguments” in each. I’d like to suggest another experiment: pairing students with kids in other parts of the country to engage in debate and discussion about controversial issues. A school in deep-blue New York City, for example, might connect high schoolers via Zoom with students in bright-red rural Alabama. One week, they might discuss reproductive rights; the next week, gun control.
Hlavacik might reply that I’m envisioning my own innovation here, which will inevitably spawn some kind of exposé. A biased or misinformed teacher will say the wrong thing, a student will videotape them, the tape will go viral, and the outrage machine will kick into gear. But that is a risk we need to take. If we want to preserve American democracy, we must teach the art of argument and compromise. The biggest barrier to educating informed critical thinkers isn’t the culture wars. It’s our fear of engaging in them.
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