| Abstract: | The American public landscape has shifted in concert with a newly emboldened political right, and the public school has again become an important battlefield in the latest culture wars. In addition to confrontations over educational policy issues is a largely untheorized area where the everyday classroom takes center stage: Teachers face a difficult situation when it is students’ spontaneous utterances, rather than curricula or policy issues, at the center of religiously rooted controversy. How teachers respond to these situations, and the basis for their responses, is crucial as they continue to navigate the increasingly problematic relationship between the religiously orthodox and pluralist public schooling. Pushing the conversation into the everyday workings of the real, live public school classroom is critical to liberal theorists if they are to significantly impact discourse related to the purposes and aims of public education in pluralist societies. |
