Public education reflects the ideas that various stakeholders hold about relationships between schooling and society and the forms of knowledge that are deemed most socially valuable (Kliebard, 2004; Spring, 2016). Public education can be used to support human flourishing and the cultivation of skills needed for civic participation in democratic society (Freire, 2001; Giroux, 2012, 2016; Watkins, 2012);it can also be used to advance economic and political ideologies that do not enhance the human condition (Spring, 2016). As a valuable tool for gaining public consensus (Giroux, 2012; Watkins, 2001), public education is a contested site within which stakeholders struggle over questions of worthwhile knowledge (Kleibard, 2004; Shubert, 1986). The term 'culture wars' is often used as a descriptive metaphor for chronicling historical and contemporary struggles over national culture that are waged by competing social groups in the United States (Alfonseca, 2023; Hartman, 2015). Within the landscape of public education, these cultural struggles over what knowledge is of most worth (Spencer, 1861) influence the formal and informal curricula of public and higher education (Banks, 2013; Hartman, 2015, 2018; Zimmerman, 2021). Within each iteration of the culture wars, differing conceptions of worthwhile knowledge have been put forth by various stakeholders to promote knowledge they deem to be most socially valuable. The current iteration of the U.S. culture wars centers issues of racial and gender identity, sexual orientation, and the teaching of history. Through a convergence of religious, economic, and politically fundamentalist perspectives largely focused on 'national decline' (Zimmerman, 2021) and parents' rights (Schultz, 2022), social conservatives have found success targeting spaces of public and higher education to inflict their visions of socially valuable knowledge into the national culture.