"My way or the highway" : the Hawkins County textbook controversy

In the late summer of 1983 a small group of fundamentalist families in Hawkins County, Tennessee, raised religiously based objections to a series of reading textbooks that had been adopted for use in the county's schools. The resulting social conflict ended five years later, after two appellate court decisions in favor of the school system. This outcome was widely interpreted as a victory for academic freedom and a triumph for the nation's public schools over efforts by the religious right to censor or control the school curriculum. This research sought to determine whether available data supported another explanation for this controversy. The intent, therefore, was to generate rather than test theory. The methodology adopted for this purpose was a grounded theory approach to qualitative analysis. There is no thesis statement, nor are there any intentionally applied theoretical assumptions. There are, however, two delimitations. First, the parents' objections and the religious beliefs upon which they were based were accepted at face value. And second, this is not a comparative study of Hawkins County's problem with other religion-in-the-schools conflicts. Data consisted primarily of attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, values, and motives of the participants, their fellow citizens, and other observers as these were expressed in personal interviews, pretrial depositions, court testimony, and news reports and analyses. Data analysis led to identification of accommodation of student First Amendment free exercise rights as the central issue of the controversy: Could individuals whose religious values and beliefs conflict with segments of the school curriculum be accommodated without being forced either to forfeit their right to public education or to compromise their values and beliefs? Two models for accommodation were rejected by the school system and its supporters as a result of the complex interplay of cultural, contextual, and judicial factors. At the local level this rejection had serious personal, social, and educational consequences. It also had important civil rights implications. Educators received assurances that accommodation of student free exercise objections to the curriculum was not required. But religious minorities were given notice that their access to public schools required their sufferance of majority values.