Comment on "The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy"

Abstract

Page and Clelland attempt to rescue Kanawha County textbook controversy from misleading journalistic accounts which describe conflict as one between authoritarian reactionaries (cultural luddities, according to Baker and Barnes) and educational progressives by stressing of lifestyle concern. As example of social analysis (267), however, their essay is plagued with serious problems. These lead to two shortcomings: (1) a resort to traditionalism vs. modernism as an explanatory account and (2) failure to probe ironies of working-class activism. Objecting to emphasis on defense of declining prestige in status politics literature, authors propose to open up that approach by fixing instead on the politics of everyday life as a group phenomenon (266). But methods they use prevent this approach. By aggregating individual status characteristics, they remove conflict from social structure, movement's process and its grounding in social history, and from its related cultural meaning. The ahistorical examination of SES characteristics of protest region and movement leaders diverts attention from working-class character of protest in three ways.