Learning Curbed
It’s lesson time: classroom wars in California once put a vibrant school system in the poorhouse.
American classrooms don’t really look much like this anymore. The major reason: progressive interventions implemented over the last half century, like group learning and classroom discussions, had shaken things up. These trends also brought novel content as well, with curricula that promote critical inquiry, social and emotional empathy, cross-cultural awareness, and a deeper understanding of U.S. history, including its troubling and tragic aspects. All of this, our guest today says, has been under assault since it began - and still is.
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Education is our subject this week. You’ve heard all about attacks on the teaching of racism and slavery, about the banning of books on the Holocaust and gender identity, about Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill. Public schools are ground zero in the battle over American civic life. But this is nothing new, historian Natalia Petrzela says. She locates the roots of such controversies in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s that continue to play out today amid a climate of discontent muddled by pandemic anxieties.
In this 1971 photo taken at Citrus High School in Azusa, Calif., an honor student named Judy Fay writes on the blackboard. California led the way with then-radical approaches to sex education, welcoming rather than ostracizing pregnant teens.
Life Magazine / Rare Historical Photos
With one of the biggest and most centralized school systems in the country, California proved to be a bellwether on education controversies in the mid-20th century, especially following the 1965 Immigration Act, which enabled the influx of many new residents from Asia and Latin America. Conservative blowback on multicultural awareness and sex education in school curricula played a major role in the 1970s in successful efforts to curb California’s education budget. Still, while the right may have won on the funding front, Petrzela says, progressives largely won on questions of content and learning methods, cementing a wave of classroom innovations in California and across the country.
Schooling during the pandemic has brought these reforms into high relief, as many students were learning from home and parents were peering more closely over their children’s shoulders. This situation also produced a curious reshuffling of political alignments among families with school-age kids, as liberal parents — like Petrzela herself, who argued for schools to reopen in New York City — found themselves under attack and in the odd company of covid-deniers.
