Classroom Wars
Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Reviews and Awards
"Admirably and provocatively, Petrzela draws multiple connections between subjects often treated separately: between bilingual education and sex education; between bilingual education, sex education, and the property tax revolt that began in California and swept through the nation; between cultural politics in the classroom and fiscal politics over school funding; and between educational history/historiography and political history/historiography." - Mark Brilliant, History of Education Quarterly
"Classroom Wars is an intelligent, compelling study that connects the seemingly distant policies of bilingual education and sex education to shed new light on political culture. It is an excellent history that ingeniously challenges interpretive narrowness and will be influential in several different historical fields." - Carlos Kevin Blanton, Journal of American History
"Extensive accounts of two critical issues in California public education in the late 1960s and 1970s-sex and Spanish bilingual education-are thoroughly vetted in this book by Petrzela ... Petrzela challenges dichotomies and examines paradoxes, contributing to an enlightening picture of a critical era in California public education ... Recommended." - CHOICE
"In this carefully researched, empirically grounded, and elegantly written book, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela explores debates and politics of bilingual education and sex education in California at the origins of the 'culture wars.' She tells an engaging, accessible, and compelling history of these conflicts that has important implications for how we understand postwar American political culture and education, past and present. Scholars and students of education history, education policy, and postwar American politics and culture will want to read this book." - Tracy L. Steffes, School, author of School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940
"What's the matter with Kansas — or with America — and its endless culture wars? According to a common liberal refrain, contemporary conservatives have invoked hot-button cultural issues to persuade Americans to vote against their own economic interests. But that claim is itself a liberal conceit, ignoring the many ways that the American Right wove cultural and economic grievances into a cohesive and enduring ideology. No matter which way your own politics lean, you won't be able to understand modern American conservatism without reading Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's brave and original book." - Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
"Well-written and revealing ... Documents political conflict about schooling in California during the 1960s and 1970s ... Petrzela illuminates the shifting political terrain that made these issues so potent. Hers is a telling account of how schooling became a partisan enterprise, especially as educators widened the curricular and extracurricular aims." - John L. Rury, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Petrzela is one of the first scholars to bring together two flourishing bodies of historiography: the now massive literature on the rise of the modern American conservative movement and the smaller but expanding corpus of work on Latino/a Americans since the landmark 1965 Hart-Celler Act. That so few historians have yet to couple these two topics is surprising given that hostility to brown-skinned Mexican immigrants has become one of the defining sensibilities of contemporary American conservatism ... Breaks important new ground." - Andrew Hartman, H-1960s
"Petrzela offers a vivid, detailed historiographical account of the politically charged educational policy debates regarding bilingual education and sexual education in California." - Melissa Moschella, American Political Thought
"The archival research ... brings recent and enduring educational controversies to life in Classroom Wars." - Jennifer Burek Pierce, American Historical Review
"creative and insightful ... Petrzela has produced an important book about an understudied part of the culture wars. Her careful and thorough research makes numerous significant arguments relevant to both the past and the present. Thanks to this fine work, we will no longer be able to separate debates over sex-ed from those over bilingual education." - Matthew Avery Sutton, Pacific Historical Review
