Analysis
Joe L. Kincheloe in "Understanding the New Right and its Impact on Education" (1983) made the argument that the actions of Kanawha County School Board Member Alice Moore and her fundamentalist Christian allies in the 1974 controversy represented a defining moment in not only educational politics but American political history as well. Arguing that the Kanawha County textbook controversy was the first major victory for conservative evangelical Christians in the politically polarizing cultural debates that emerged out of the 1960s social unrest, Kincheloe wrote in the early 1980s and in subsequent work that the victory was a key moment in what he and Aaron Gresson (2004) have labeled the right-wing recovery movement. This movement has profoundly shaped subsequent American education and electoral politics, as proponents have attempted to regain the power they perceived themselves to have lost in the 1960s cultural movements. In the case of the Kanawha County controversy, Moore and her supporters perceived that progressive secularists were undermining Christian values in their embrace of moral relativism, atheism and sexual experimentation (amongst other things) in educational textbooks a la 60s liberationism. Thus, Kincheloe's interpretation of the West Virginia controversy assumes a historical significance lost on many of those who have written about it over the last three and one half decades (Kincheloe, 2001).
After the textbook controversy, a previously nonexistent group of private "Christian schools" appeared throughout the state to teach values that some residents found more appropriate.
Read more about this topic: Kanawha County Textbook Controversy
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