Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

About this episode

Mark Hlavacik discusses how the culture wars have impacted the politics of education in the U.S. from the 1970s to the present.

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education. On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible. In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Mark Hlavacik

Topics covered

• culture wars
• education politics
• book banning
• public education
• historical analysis
• schooling innovation

Keywords

• education
• culture wars
• politics
• book banning
• school libraries
• public education
• historical context

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U Chicago Press

Places: Texas

More episodes of New Books in Education

• Kristen Abbott Bennett, "Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World" (Cambridge UP, 2025) · June 12, 2026 · 1h 4m
• Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025) · June 10, 2026 · 52 min
• Ladan Rahbari and Olga Burlyuk eds., "From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity" (Open Book Publishers, 2026) · June 8, 2026 · 58 min
• Mary R. Lanni, "Using Nursery Rhymes with Today’s Kids: Their Legacy and Evolution" (Bloomsbury, 2026) · June 4, 2026 · 39 min
• Romani Grassroots Language Learning · June 3, 2026 · 31 min
• Cultural Competence Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Talking culturally responsive teaching with Dr Remy Low · May 31, 2026