Educational Hegemony and Culture Wars: Reframing Patriotic Education as Epistemic Control in Trump-Era U.S. Schooling

Abstract

This critical qualitative research examines the discourse and policy of patriotic education during the era of Donald Trump’s administration in the United States as a form of epistemic control within culture wars. The study analyzes how this hegemonic project is operationalized through three interconnected levels: the articulation of an official narrative in The 1776 Report, the migration and reincarnation of its core logic into state-level legislation such as Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, and its implications and contestations in the classroom. The research findings indicate that The 1776 Report functions as a blueprint for standardizing a “state epistemology” that excludes critical narratives, while threats to abolish the Department of Education and defunding policies aim to weaken the institutional capacity for counter-knowledge. These control efforts, which metamorphosed into state law, ironically triggered epistemic fragmentation and gave birth to various forms of pedagogical resistance. Using a comparative perspective, this study places the U.S. case within the global map of nationalist education politics. It concludes that educational culture wars represent a fundamental struggle over the production of collective memory and the legitimation of knowledge, with serious implications for the shared knowledge foundation required for deliberative democracy.