I recently reported something that, as someone who desires social harmony, I was glad to see but, as someone who desires harmony, made me nervous. I reported that culture war in public schools had abated significantly in 2024. As catalogued on the Cato Institute’s Public Schooling Battle Map, an interactive database of values and identity-based conflicts in public schools that I maintain, battles fell from 549 in 2023 to 321 in 2024, a 42 percent drop.
Why was I nervous? Because there is a myth that government-funded and run schools — public schooling — foster peace, and that without them, and especially were public dollars to follow children to schools their families chose, Americans would be balkanized. We would be both separated and at each others’ throats. The Battle Map is an effort to illustrate the falsehood of this premise. Far from fostering peace, forcing people with diverse values to fund a single system of government schools fuels constant political and social conflict.
My concern is that, after several years of feverish battles nationwide, those who accept this dangerous myth could conclude that the recent scourge of culture war in public schools — book “banning,” bathroom battles, and more — was an aberration. A product of a once-in-a-century pandemic that frayed all of our nerves. They could go back to assuming public schooling is a uniting force.
But public schooling fueling culture war is not a one-time thing. Both logic and evidence tell us that culture war is inherent to public schooling, while being largely avoidable through school choice. To the detriment of everyone, it is a reality that most public schooling advocates, academics, and journalists seem to ignore, and that must not continue.
Why Does Public Schooling Fuel Conflict?
Understanding why public schooling fuels social conflict is not difficult. People have different values, needs, and desires, with religious beliefs, ethnicity, and other differences being especially personal. Public schooling requires that all, diverse people pay for a single system of government schools, which often means that only one set of values, or views of history, can prevail, and what those are is determined by political power. Whether transgender students can choose bathrooms or locker rooms, whether Advanced Placement African American Studies is taught, and whether school libraries stock the graphic novel Gender Queer is decided by democratic control that inherently creates winners and losers, and forces people into warring political camps to get what they think is right for their children.
Battles in American History, Old and Recent
This is not just the realm of theory. It has been borne out in reality countless times since public schooling gained ascendance around 1837, with the appointment of Horace Mann as the first secretary of the state board of education in Massachusetts. A few, stark examples: · In 1844, neighborhoods around Philadelphia were engulfed in street-level warfare between Roman Catholic and Protestant mobs, touched off by which version of the Bible — the Protestant King James, Catholic Douay-Rheims, or none at all — would be used in the public schools.
By the conclusion of the two waves of violence, homes and churches had been burned to the ground, hundreds of people had been injured, and tens of people had been killed. · In 1859, a ten-year-old Catholic student in Boston refused to read the King James version of the Ten Commandments. When he persisted in his refusal, he was rapped on the hand with a rattan cane until he bled, and ultimately hundreds of students who refused the order were expelled from the school. The boy’s father sued the school’s assistant principal, who administered the beating, for assault and battery, but a court ruled that the principal was simply doing his job.
· In 1974, the Kanawha County, West Virginia, school district was paralyzed by the “Kanawha County Textbook War.” The battle began in the district containing progressive urban and conservative rural populations after the school board adopted a number of books that many conservative residents found unacceptable for moral and political reasons, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X and a textbook that discussed Freud’s theory that children have sexual attractions to their opposite sex parents. The battle resulted in mass student walkouts, bombings of schools and the board of education, an anti-textbook protester being shot, and more turmoil. Of course, this is not just dusty history. In just the last few years we have seen the arrest of upset speakers at school board meetings, student walkouts, and a plea by the National School Boards Association for the federal government, including the FBI, to investigate real and perceived threats to members. Prior to 2021 battles were less frequent — or at least less frequently reported — but nonetheless Cato’s Public School Battle Map contains nearly 2,500 conflicts collected between 2004 and 2020, with contests over everything from teaching the origins of life to student hairstyles.
Is There More Peace Than There Seems? That said, only around 13 percent of the country’s roughly 13,300 school districts are on the map. This could indicate that the vast majority of districts have been at peace. Which is plausible: One of the pacifying forces in American public schooling has been local control, which allows members of often small communities to make their own curricular and administrative decisions. To the significant extent that people with similar backgrounds and values tend to live with one another, this has helped to avoid conflict.
But do not suddenly feel comfortable. For one thing, the Battle Map is populated with conflicts we find via media reports. Many districts might be too small to get dedicated — or any — coverage, with around 47 percent enrolling fewer than 1,000 students. Consistent with this, while we have found at least one battle in only 13 percent of districts, those districts account for nearly half of all public-school students. And a lot of conflict occurs at the state level — think “Don’t Say Gay” or mandatory ethnic studies — which pulls everyone in the state into education culture war. The Map contains nearly 850 state-level conflicts.
Freedom Brings Peace
If force is the spark of conflict, freedom puts away the matches. Rather than require all, diverse people to fund government schools, funding could follow children to educational arrangements their families choose. The idea of such funding goes at least as far back as Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1791 that “education to be useful to the poor, should be on the spot, and the best method, I believe, to accomplish this is to enable the parents to pay the expenses themselves.” If we fund students, and let all families choose among diverse educational options, the major impetus for conflict disappears — no one has to impose on someone who wants something different to get what they want for themselves.
When we look outside of our borders, we see that choice has, at least to some extent, been embraced in countries all over the world. As UNESCO recently reported, “Governments financially support non-state schools in 171 out of 204 countries: these include private schools in 115 countries, faith-based schools in 120 countries; and non-governmental organization and community schools in 81 countries.” In the Netherlands, which is arguably the leading country for choice, if as few as 200 families desire a type of school not currently available to them — Catholic, Steiner, and so on — government will pay for it. Many countries have incorporated choice at least in part to resolve or avoid political battles for supremacy among diverse groups, as well as to affirmatively support plural society. This is not typically fully free-market choice — governments set many regulations about curriculum, teacher hiring, and more — but it supports the fundamental right of families to choose among schools holding worldviews they think are correct.
Conclusion
Why am I worried to report that culture war in public schooling has declined over the past year? Because I want lasting peace, and that will only come when the public realizes that not compulsion, but choice, is key to diverse people peacefully living together.
