Sending your kids to school may seem as routine and banal a practice as any to millions of American parents. But as recent confrontations over masks, gender identities, and “critical race theory” have shown, schools are profoundly political spaces and have always been embroiled in larger debates over the proper relationship of education and citizenship in a democracy. Most of these school battles did not produce clear winners and losers, and the wounds struck by both sides continue to fester in early twenty-first century concerns about what children are supposed to be learning. To put the conflict over high school curricula, impressionable teenagers, and allegedly radical teachers into historical perspective, this seminar will revisit some twentieth-century forerunners to today’s clashes. The list includes the panic over the teaching of evolution in the 1920s, the anticommunist purge of the 1950s, the conflict over desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s, and the political correctness debates of the 1990s. While parents, school officials, and politicians all claimed to act on behalf of children, we will also pay attention to how children and adolescents made their voices heard and defended their interests in contentions with adults about their own future. Master and advanced Lehramt students are encouraged to enroll in this class.