Education and the Culture Wars: Morality and Conflict in American Schools

Abstract

Education has been a central field for cultural conflict in the modern era. This is because schools are one of the primary institutions for imparting shared understandings of collective identity and purpose. Schooling is a key institutional context through which a society tells itself a story about itself. Modern pluralism makes conflict in educational processes inevitable, and schools unavoidably become places where competing conceptions of the good are contested. This chapter analyzes the main areas of conflict in modern American schooling to demonstrate that schools do more than prepare students for the economy; they are normative institutions engaged in forming persons and legitimating social orders. We conclude by suggesting a neo-Durkheimian model of conflict in education that offers a cultural account of the deep structures of moral life by which social orders are constituted and through which humans make sense of their world.