he last post Glenn Youngkin shared on his website before winning the Virginia governor’s race was a list of 15 purported “lies” told by his opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Eleven concerned schools, and Youngkin’s rebuttals mostly centered on a promise core to his campaign: He would make “parents matter” in the educational decisions that affect their children. Some dismissed this strategy — which evolved from less-controversial talking points, such as raising teacher pay and protecting free speech, to proclamations about banning critical race theory — as purely symbolic. Barack Obama called it “fake outrage” intended only to boost ratings; commentators insisted that anger over education was “phony,” “hysterical nonsense” and a “manufactured culture war.”
To be sure, invoking the fraught realms of school and family reliably inflames voters; it’s a political strategy almost as old as the modern school system. In the early 1940s, the superpatriotic American Legion warned parents of the “sinister” aims of a popular textbook series that centered “social problems” to purportedly brainwash children into becoming vengeful communists. In the 1960s, opponents of sex education argued that courses designed by “secular humanists” would turn children against their parents and into pleasure-seeking, long-haired protest marchers. Just a few years later, the curricular boogeyman was a social studies program that supposedly threatened to destroy children’s love of country and family by suggesting that non-Western cultures — or even the animal kingdom — could offer insight into American society. The culprits were a consistent but varied cast of “educationists,” villainized as both incompetent and malevolent: Bloated bureaucrats and lazy union hacks freeloading off tax-funded salaries coexisted with scheming teachers and pointy-headed professors intent on corrupting children with leftist ideologies or sexual perversion.
Hindsight makes clear that these hypotheses were outrageous. But while it’s important to debunk the racism, sexism and homophobia driving these moral panics, it’s just as important to understand why they took hold. During these and countless other “classroom wars,” including Virginia’s contest this past week, schools become sites of such intense controversy precisely because they reflect larger social transformations. Seismic events such as the Great Depression, a world war and the civil rights struggle — or, today, a pandemic and a major reckoning around structural inequality — do change the experience of education. The resulting unease primes people, especially parents, to believe outlandish theories about the nature of these changes and what they represent, and to seize upon curricular issues as a concrete way to exert control over larger, inchoate and often unsettling social and political shifts. School issues, then, are no mere cipher for “real” concerns: They’re central to contemporary political culture, in Virginia and beyond.