Perspective: Ron DeSantis is the darling of the right after his smashing reelection on a night that proved surprisingly good for Democrats. Conservatives have long favored the Florida governor for his willingness to lean into the culture wars in education.
at the request of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation , a right-wing nonprofit organization.
The effort spotlights how an argument used by advocates of public schooling to build support for universal public education has become a potent weapon for conservatives to push their cultural agenda on American children.In the early 19th century, advocates of public education, like Horace Mann, argued that schools would be a setting to cultivate a shared national identity.
Nationalism was reformers’ foremost argument for institutionalizing public education, as historian Cody Dodge Ewert has written. Public education was under the purview of the states, but framing public schools as a nationalist cause made the idea popular at a time when the rapidly developing country was searching to stake out its own identity.
After World War II, schoolwide recognition of patriotic holidays became an essential part of the academic year. Throughout the 1950s, teachers led children in celebrations of Columbus Day and Veterans Day, recitals of the Pledge of Allegiance , and in singing patriotic songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America .” Public colleges even required oaths from their faculty and students, who swore they were loyal Americans and not secret Soviet agents.
Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, conservatives continued to fight to keep schools from moving away from values steeped in Christianity and White culture. They protested a wide range of things, from bans on school prayer to the creation of ethnic studies programs to sex education.
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