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The Great School Wars that the educational historian and educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch wrote about in 1974 have returned with a vengeance.

Older battlesover tracking, community control, public funding for religious schools, multicultural education and even busingonce thought laid to rest, have resurfaced, while a host of new flashpoints, over critical race theory, school choice, charter schools, publicly funded tuition vouchers, equity, standardized testing, teacher accountability, transgender students rights and sex education, have exploded.

Even a glance at the news headlines reveals the depth and intensity of the deep cultural divides surrounding K-12 education. Here are a few examples:

San Francisco has become a touchstone in this educational Kulturkampf, whether the issue involves the names of public schools, the display of an allegedly racially insensitive mural by a 1930s Communist, the use of the word chief as part of administrative titles, or the districts math curriculum, which professors from Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford and UCLA claim will leave students, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, less prepared for postsecondary STEM education.

I recently spoke with a reporter who had been asked by her editor to write about the relationship between education and democracy. This is, of course, a fraught, extraordinarily complicated topic.

Theres the Dewey-esque notion of education as the bedrock of democracy: as the instrument for producing informed, reflective, independently minded citizens, rather than passive, compliant drones.

John Deweys civic-minded vision has, of course, inspired generations of educators, who aspire to transform their classrooms into models of democracy in action, cultivating students who can think critically, question established beliefs, undertake independent, in-depth research and engage in various forms of active learning.

Then theres how education actually functions in todays democracy:

As I spoke with the reporter, I thought quite a bit about what it means for the educational system itself to be democratic.

I think its fair to say that the history of primary and secondary education in the United States is, in fact, a series of ongoing controversies over education and democracy. Although the areas of contention have shifted over time, whats at stake is nothing less than these questions:

Those of us who teach at colleges should not assume that we are largely invulnerable to the kinds of cultural conflicts raging across the K-12 landscape. Nor should those who teach in California or New York be sanguine that the kinds of controversies raging in Texas and Florida over tenure or guns on campus have nothing to do with their states.

Faculty even in the bluest of blue states need to recognize that institutional autonomy is ebbing and that their legislatures are becoming much more intrusive in matters of admissions, curricular requirements, credit transfer, remedial education and institutional spending priorities.

Also, one-shot infusions of funds into public colleges and universities should not blind faculty to a host of worrisome long-term trends, for example in demographics and student preparation and interests, that will inevitably disrupt higher education.

Democracy is not simply a matter of free elections and voting rights. Its about empowerment. Its about conflicting interest groups and lobbies, each asserting their own values and priorities.

Today, more and more campus stakeholders believe that they should have a greater voice in institutional functioning. The most striking examples can be found in growth of graduate student unions and the emergence of the first undergraduate unions, It has come as a shock to many faculty members to discover that in campus decision making, theirs is only one voice among many, and not necessarily the loudest or more influential.

Democracy is messy and doesnt necessarily produce the optimal outcomes. Academic politics is especially acrimonious, not because (in words usually attributed to Henry Kissinger) the stakes are so low, but because the battles are never simply contests over power or struggles for dominance or assertions of self-interest. These contests are ultimately about values, vision, mission and institutional priorities with a larger goal of consensus building.

At their best, colleges and universities and their departments function according to a distinctive form of shared governance, which combines the best of two distinctive conceptions of democracy: deliberative democracy and participatory democracy. In consequence, the political process and representation within that process are as important as the resulting decisions.

If campus politics isnt ultimately about mission and a broad sense of the collective good, then the academy really is nothing more than yet another corporate entity in todays callous, unfeeling bureaucratic society.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Democracy and Education | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed