This book examines the current debates about the curriculum in historical context and offers considerations for the future.

No topic sparks an argument faster among the American public, even with relatively apolitical people, than how their children are taught. In schools across the country, school boards, parents, teachers, and students themselves debate issues ranging from charter schools, to the first amendment rights of students, to the efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act. School districts in Georgia and Pennsylvania have seen battles over the teaching of evolution; places as diverse as Colorado, Washington, and Kentucky have had debates over how best to protect children while at school. Battleground: Schools provides an in-depth, balanced overview of these controversial topics and enables teachers, students, and their parents to better understand the foundations of these conflicts.

Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that "only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics." The Cold War battle for the American school - dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik - proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s. Beginning with the genealogy of progressive education, and ending with the formation of New Left and New Right thought, Education and the Cold War offers a fresh perspective on the postwar transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era.

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In the 1950s–80s, Brazil built one of the most advanced industrial networks among the "developing" countries, initially concentrated in the state of São Paulo. But from the 1980s, decentralization of industry spread to other states reducing São Paulo's relative importance in the country's industrial product. This volume draws on social, economic, and demographic data to document the accelerated industrialization of the state and its subsequent shift to a service economy amidst worsening social and economic inequality. Through its cultural institutions, universities, banking, and corporate sectors, the municipality of São Paulo would become a world metropolis. At the same time, given its rapid growth from 2 million to 12 million residents in this period, São Paulo dealt with problems of distribution, housing, and governance. This significant volume elucidates these and other trends during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and will be an invaluable reference for scholars of history, policy, and the economy in Latin America.

If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well. While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures. School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected. Deckman examines important questions: Why do conservative Christians run for school boards? How much influence has the Christian Right actually had on school boards? How do conservative Christians govern? School Board Battles is an in-depth and in-the-trenches look at an important encounter in the "culture war"—one that may well determine the future of our nation's youth.

Debate about teaching the great books of the Western canon has galvanized American higher education in recent years. The Great Canon Controversy provides an overview of the debate, summarizing the position for the canon and the position against it. Casement supports continued teaching of the canon and respect for it, while calling for revising reading lists to include nontraditional works. Part I describes how the canon was taught from ancient Greece to the present, noting key arguments for this form of pedagogy that are still with us today, specific books that were taught at different times over the centuries, and controversies the canon has been subject to in the past. Part II deals with anticanonism, epistemological and political dimensions of the theory underlying it. Casement then shows concrete examples of anticanonism in operation, at Stanford University and St. Lawrence University. Casement argues that, while much of what anticanonists say is hyperbolic or mistaken, we should listen to their demand to give fair treatment to works by marginalized authors and to great non-Western works. This means re-reviewing works worthy of canonization that may have been obscured by prejudice, but still requiring that they make it on their own merits and not out of sympathy for their authors. The Great Canon Controversy will be of great interest to educators and students alike, as well as those interested in the future of higher education in the United States.