Description
This book grows out of Salomone's study of a real case of continuing conflict over values in the Bedford, New York school district. The controversy began in 1995 as a disagreement over an extracurricular card game and soon escalated into a constitutional battle sweeping across the curriculum. She shows the reader that Bedford offers valuable lessons about parental discretion, school governance, tolerance, the political purposes of schooling, and the limits of constitutionalism. She uses as her main focus the claims made by religious conservatives whose unswerving faith an unwillingness to compromise their values present the starkest of backdrops against which to explore the concept of education for democratic citizenship in a society that values both freedom of conscience and civic commitment. She concludes that "controlled choice" is needed in American education.
