1st Edition
Culture Wars in American Education Past and Present Struggles Over the Symbolic Order
Culture Wars in American Education: Past and Present Struggles Over the Symbolic Order radically questions norms and values held within US Education and analyses why and how culture wars in American education are intense, consequential, and recurrent.
Applying the concept of “symbolic order,” this volume elaborates ways in which symbolic representations are used to draw boundaries, allocate status, and legitimate the exercise of authority and power within American schooling. In particular, the book illustrates the “terms of inclusion” by which full membership in the national community is defined, limited, and contested. It suggests that repetitive patterns in the symbolic order, for example, the persistence of the representation of an individualistic basis of American society and polity, constrain the reach of progressive change. The book examines the World War I era Americanization movement, the World War II era Intercultural Education movement, the late-twentieth-century Multicultural Education movement, continuing right-wing assaults on Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and historical and contemporary conflicts over the incorporation of languages other than Standard English into approved instructional approaches.
In the context of continuing culture wars in the United States and across the globe, this book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in critical studies of education, history of education, sociology of education, curriculum theory, Multicultural Education, and comparative education, as well as to educators enmeshed in contemporary tensions and conflicts.
1. Introduction 2. Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900-1925: An Analysis of Symbolic Action 3. The Recurring Dream: Symbolism and Ideology in Intercultural Education and Mainstream Multicultural Education 4. Many More Tucsons? Ethnic Studies in Public Schools 5. Regulating Language: Why Did Oakland’s Ebonics Resolution Cause a Language Panic While California’s Proposition 227 Did Not? 6. Retreat from Nativism? Dual Language Education 7. What Have Immigrants Wanted From American Schools? What Do They Want Now? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigrants, Language, and American Schooling 8. Epilogue
Biography
Michael R. Olneck is Emeritus Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
“How schools teach about human diversity can either reproduce or challenge dominant cultural norms, a fact that fuels perennial culture wars over the history curriculum. Michael Olneck’s provocative new study is essential reading for anyone who wants to make sense of culture wars over teaching about race, gender, and social inequality in American public schools. This study highlights the inherent shortcomings of multicultural education, but also reveals how it could be revitalized to fulfill the civic mandate of public education in a multiracial democracy."
Zoë Burkholder, Professor of Educational Foundations, Montclair State University, author of ‘An African American Dilemma A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North’ (2021)
“Schools make Americans, but Americans disagree about who they are. So schools are also sites of contestation between competing views of the nation itself. Anyone who wants to understand our contemporary battles over critical race theory and gender identity in the schools should read Michael Olneck's wise and prescient book.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education and author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (2nd edition, 2022)
“Michael Olneck has written a very important and insightful book that helps the educator and general reader understand the meaning of the “Culture Wars” and their corrosive impact on education. Olneck gives necessary historical perspective and contextualization to this war over signs. With great analytic power and forcefulness, he makes clear the critical issues at stake in this conflagrating war over symbolism and the struggle over the iconography of the past, present and future that existentially threatens the autonomy of the teacher in the classroom and the very future of the educational enterprise.”
Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar, Communication Scholar, Former Director of Global Studies in Education at the University of Illinois-Urbana
