ABSTRACT
Teaching young people how to talk about highly controversial political issues in schools is not a new concept. For almost a century, many advocates of democratic education, especially within the social studies, have called for the infusion of such issues into the curriculum. In the early 20th century, for example, a number of scholars creating the new field of social studies encouraged teachers to focus on the “problems of democracy” through the analysis of authentic political issues. Subsequently, in a 1948 issue of Social Education, Richard E. Gross promoted this kind of teaching with the pithily titled article, “Teaching Controversial Issues Can Be Fun” (Gross, 1948). By the 1960s, a “jurisprudential” approach to analyzing historic and contemporary policy issues was introduced into the curriculum as part of the Harvard Social Studies Project, which itself was embedded within the “new social studies” (Oliver & Shaver, 1974).
