In an interview with Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn for Jacobin, Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of The Education Wars explains how the culture wars figure in the larger debates about public education.
Because people disagree so profoundly on the point of public education, we’ve recently seen some policy proposals that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. Take, for example, the governor of Louisiana announcing that public schools are going to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, or Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Commissioner of Education, announcing that every public school will be required to not only post the Ten Commandments, but also teach the Bible.
They share a particular vision of what public schools are for: to produce Christians. What about all the other kids? They don’t have an answer for that.
Some people feel very strongly that school is where kids should learn to become patriots. Look at what’s happening in Florida: Governor Ron DeSantis is mandating that kids learn how great capitalism is — because if we don’t instill that early, they’ll grow up to become socialists. If you look at some of the specific changes that have been made to social-studies curricula in states like Texas and Florida, one of the things they’re eliminating is the opportunity for kids to work together in groups to solve a problem, because they’re worried that kids will grow up thinking that collective action is the answer.
Much of this is driven by a concern that kids today are so much further to the left than the generations that preceded them. On issue after issue, they want to see a stronger government role in providing things like housing and education and government intervention to deal with climate change. If you’re a red-state legislator, policymaker, or governor, you look at those polls and say, “We need to fix this, and we’re going to do it through the schools.”