The grownups are fighting harder and louder than they have in years, both in words and deeds, about education, as well as everything else. Across the political spectrum, schools are treated not as civic institutions but as battlegrounds in a broader struggle over identity, power, and national belonging. In rhetoric and increasingly in policy, education is framed in existential terms, with nearly every issue cast as a fight for the nation’s soul. The temperature is high, the language martial, and the stakes are described as nothing less than civilizational.
This escalation among adults comes at a moment when war and conflict are not abstract tropes in political speech but real headlines, from a U.S. operation in Venezuela to renewed talk of military action against Iran and strategic bluster over Greenland’s place in our great power rivalry. This war-footing posture is not limited to one party; in education, nearly everyone now speaks the language of culture war. The current administration, however, has leaned into it in striking ways, characterizing certain ideas, curricula, and educators as national threats. Indeed, the president once called upon his supporters to “lay down their very lives” against what he described as racial indoctrination in K–12 schooling.
Yet for all the funhouse-mirror war talk, the reality inside most classrooms is strikingly prosaic. Teachers are not manning ideological barricades; they are managing behavior, trying to cover material, and scrambling to fill gaps left by chronic absenteeism and staffing shortages. Although the charged political rhetoric may spook a few teachers—primarily in red states—from discussing current affairs, most classrooms carry on without incident. But that surface stability masks deeper problems, according to a New York Times book review of “The Cradle of Citizenship” by journalist James Traub:
The real crisis… is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all… If students do want to engage, their dependence on social media simplifies their views. As Traub discovers, their credulousness toward online sources renders them dependent on present-day culture war influencers whose historical claims they are unprepared to challenge. Against this tide, teachers struggle to get their students to see how the world of the past could be both alien and instructive in a way that might stoke their skepticism.
Students are not pawns in a pitched battle so much as victims of academic neglect, nearly all of whom will graduate high school with little understanding of history or government.
The evidence here is sobering. The latest national results show that only about 14 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level in U.S. history, and only 22 percent did so in civics, while scores in both subjects continue to fall as part of a disappointing decade-long decline. More students now score in the lowest categories, unable to answer even basic questions about the Constitution or the Civil War. Many can read the Gettysburg Address without recognizing that soldiers died in the conflict.
We also lack comprehensive state-level civics data, so policymakers cannot answer even simple questions like whether there was a “Mississippi Miracle” in civics the way we have for the “Southern Surge” in reading. Expanding NAEP civics assessments at the state level could fill this gap, providing a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t. Traub’s excellent new book documents a range of issues in civics education, from curriculum gaps to classroom realities, and readers should consult it for a deeper understanding of how students are—or aren’t—learning the foundations of democracy.
Math and reading scores have long been troubling, but history and civics are particularly consequential because students who lack basic knowledge in these areas are more susceptible to polarization, mistrust, and civic breakdown. At the same time, Uncle Sam has scaled back research capacity and sent mixed signals about his commitment to assessment and accountability, potentially leaving researchers and policymakers with less evidence of how students are faring.
That remains the real education challenge—and today’s air war among adult factions isn’t helping the country to meet it. The effect is not just theatrical. When education policy is framed as a struggle for the heart of the republic, the machinery of governance starts to bend toward drama rather than evidence. As political pundit Jonah Goldberg explains:
When you invoke war as the analogue to something else, you’re trying to steal the authority and permission that war gives… trying to say that the rules don’t apply… War causes people to… follow orders. That’s why politicians love to invoke war—to sidestep the messy rules… War fever is seductive and intoxicating…
It’s one thing to draw on the urgency of Sputnik-era education reform, when the nation mobilized to strengthen math and science without turning classrooms into weaponized battlegrounds. It’s quite another to ratchet up the language to the point that Washington’s handling of schools feels like a life-or-death cause—so much so that the very essentials of teaching and learning are pushed to the margins.
None of this is to deny that partisan signaling exists in schools. Traub documents real political battles in places like Texas and Florida, as well as Minnesota and Illinois, and he did encounter isolated examples of overt ideological expression by teachers. But those cases were the exception, not the rule. Far more common was a quieter reality: educators trying to do their jobs while navigating shifting directives and political pressure from above. The danger of today’s martial spectacle is that it turns what should be treated as an urgent national imperative—getting students back on track—into a permanent emergency. Emergencies reward theatrics, demand loyalty, and short-circuit judgment. In the end, the central conflict in K–12 education is not good versus evil or red versus blue, but seriousness versus stupidity. And too many adults, including those with the most power, have mistaken performative combat for serious thinking, to the detriment of the students they claim to be fighting for.
