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-cent
