Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Political Culture by Natalia Mehlman Petrzella (review)

This well-written and revealing book documents political conflict about schooling in California during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on sex education and bilingual programs. Much of this ground has been traversed in other studies, but Petrzella 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 purview of their curricular and extracurricular aims.

From the standpoint of methodology and perspective, Petrzella offers a predominantly conventional account. Much of the narrative concerns the views and activities of organizations and political figures in the educational system. Despite its title, the book features scant attention to actual classrooms. It contains engaging discussions of particular communities, and chapters devoted to San Mateo, San Jose, and Anaheim, but this material is also concerned primarily with key organizations and activists. Petrzella shows little interest in any relevant theoretical perspective.

Petrzella begins with the mid-sixties when bilingual education was intended to bring Mexican heritage students into the educational mainstream, with support from both sides of the political divide. This situation began to change after passage of the federal Bilingual Education Act, which focused largely on language acquisition and coincided with dramatic student protests that began to polarize public opinion. Petrzella directs much of her attention to the top of the political system, discussing such figures as Eugene Gonzales, the state’s first Hispanic Deputy Secretary of Education, and Max Rafferty, Gonzales’ boss, but she also covers activists—the bilingual/bicultural advocate Ernesto Galarza, for one. But her account of popular opposition to bilingual and bicultural education is sometimes opaque or superficial.

The book’s treatment of the political conflict that surrounded sex education is more successful. Resistance to the expansion of sex education from an emphasis on venereal disease to a broad survey of human sexuality made the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (siecus) a target, giving rise to groups like Citizens for Parental Rights, the Citizens Committee of California, and the Movement to Restore Decency. Petrzella suggests that this isssue aligned with larger events—for instance, Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California two years later. Reagan’s establishment of the Moral Guidance Committee in 1968 was a potential line drawn in the sand, but a consensus on how to proceed failed to materialize. As Petrzella notes, the advance of sex education during the following decade contributed to disillusion in certain circles, possibly abetting the anti-tax movement that led to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. It cut property taxes across the state and reduced support for public schools.

Petrzella’s book provides a state-level analysis of controversies in education that Zimmerman, Moran, San Miguel, and others have examined nationally or in additional locales.¹ It represents a sound, if largely descriptive, contribution to the political history of education during this period. Other historians can build upon her work to continue plumbing the depths of cultural conflict in California and elsewhere, bringing us ever closer to understanding classroom wars in the past.