Increasingly, teachers in the US are afraid to take up contentious issues in their classrooms. These fears have been exacerbated by calls on the Right and the Left. On the Right, newly proposed and enacted laws seek to limit what and how some significant social, historical and political matters – described as ‘divisive’ in the legislation – are discussed in schools. A more generous reading of these policies suggests that they seek to stamp out discussions that might cause tension, disagreement, or discomfort in a spirit of seeking harmony and consensus. A more nefarious interpretation of these policies suggests that they are trying to restrict how concepts, such as race and equity, are taught in schools, prohibiting alternative, often more complex historical accounts that portray systemic injustice, or might raise feelings of shame. Because of their pressing and formal nature, we focus more on legislative action on the Right in this chapter. But some on the Left have made less formal suggestions that also chill classroom environments and limit the ability to teach citizenship well. These include calls for rather extreme forms of safety, where it is argued that students should be protected from topics that might upset them. It also includes silencing or ‘cancelling’ people who make some contentious claims, rather than working through the conflict they cause or talking about the substance of their claims.

In either case, Right or Left, avoiding confrontations or silencing an array of views on controversial issues fails to prepare good citizens capable of navigating partisan divides. Political divisions have recently grown even more worrisome, as most Republicans and Democrats have admitted that members of the other party ‘stirred feelings of anger and fear in them’ (Pew Research Center, 2016). Rather than safe spaces free from political controversy or conciliatory spaces aimed at simply smoothing over divisions and the emotions they provoke, we need educative spaces where careful and constructive conflict takes place, modelling civility and good civic discourse for students (Stitzlein, 2021).