Classroom wars : language, sex, and the making of modern political culture / Natalia Mehlman Petrzela.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed January 11, 2017).

"From Cultural Appreciation Days to Gay-Straight Alliances to cafeteria menus featuring "ethnic options," twenty-first century American public schools bear the unmistakable mark of the diversity that has come to define the nation in the last fifty years. At the same time, it is also in public schools where citizens continue to organize most passionately to limit the influence of this heterogeneity on our curricula and classroom culture. Classroom Wars explores how we got here. Focusing in on California's schools during the 1960s and 1970s, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela charts how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated the massive changes brought about by the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration. In California, where a volatile political culture nurtured both Orange County mega-churches and Berkeley coffeehouses, these changes reverberated especially powerfully. Analyzing two of the era's most innovative, nationally impactful, and never-before juxtaposed programs--Spanish-bilingual and sex education--Classroom Wars charts how during a time of extraordinary social change, grass-roots citizens politicized the schoolhouse and family. Many came to link such progressive educational programs not only with threats to the family and nation but also with rising taxes, which they feared were being squandered on morally lax educators teaching ethically questionable curricula. Using sources ranging from policy documents to personal letters, student newspapers, and oral histories, Petrzela reveals how in 1960s and 70s California--and the nation at large--a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, blurring the distinction between public and private and inspiring some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history, controversies that help explain the bitterness of the battles we continue to wage today"-- Provided by publisher.

Part One: Language. The Beginnings of Modern Bilingual Education -- The Polarization of Bilingual Education -- "Birds of Many Colors": Language, Culture, and Community in 1970s San Jose -- "Some Kind of Precedent": The Ambiguous Legacy of Bilingual Education -- Part Two: Sex . "The Pot was Already Boiling": Parents, Teachers, Taxes, and Sex Education in San Mateo -- Sex Education and the Unmaking of Anaheim's "Golden Age" -- "Which Way America?" California's Moral Guidelines Committee and the Forging of a Patriotic Morality -- "This Thing is Spreading All Over California": Sex Education in the Seventies.

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide