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Education and the Culture Wars

Morality and Conflict in American Schools

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Handbook of the Sociology of Morality

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This observation is widely shared. See, for instance, Reich 2002; Reed 1997; Devine 1996; Green 1996; Gitlin 1995; Bernstein 1995; Jacoby 1994; Gates 1992; Bolton 1992.

  2. 2.

    Even the priority given to math and science skills—found in a half century of reforms beginning with the Sputnik “crisis” and the more recent No Child Left Behind Act—is far from normatively neutral. The explicit argument made in these reforms is that “STEM” (or instruction on “science, technology, engineering and math”) will strengthen the national economy in the global market. And so it is that schools are forced to re-structure their educational strategies around new standards, by which instruction on some subjects like art or social studies is reduced in order to meet new requirements. The implicit normativity is found in the technical-rational and market assumptions about human purpose and social progress. Curiously, this largely functionalist (human capital) assumption remains even though there appears to be no association between number of engineers and scientists in the labor force and subsequent economic development (Ramirez and Lee 1995).

  3. 3.

    The voluminous Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (Banks 1995/2004) has no fewer than 11 sections (areas of research) and nearly 50 chapters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA

    Jeffrey S. Dill & James Davison Hunter

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  1. Jeffrey S. Dill
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  2. James Davison Hunter
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Correspondence to Jeffrey S. Dill .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Sociology, University of Iowa, Seashore Hall W. 124, Iowa City, 52242-1401, Iowa, USA

    Steven Hitlin

  2. , Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, Barrows Hall #1980 410, Berkeley, 94720, USA

    Stephen Vaisey

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Dill, J.S., Hunter, J.D. (2010). Education and the Culture Wars. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_15

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