Besides the fact that it involves children, this conflict is hot for two other reasons. First, precisely like police reform, it involves a public-sector union that certain members of the community feel is staffed and run by fundamentally hostile people who cannot be trusted to safely carry out their mission — even if given new and tough strictures and training. Second, beyond the material actually in the textbooks or videos, our new educational debate is fundamentally about allegiances in a time of dissipation and polarization. Education of children involves putting things into children’s heads — the memorization of names, facts, definitions, the learning of stories, fables, and myths. Education involves imparting certain mental skills, the use of rhetoric, the ability to decode a text, the ability to confront new, complex, and unsettling ideas with some self-confidence. But most fundamentally, it involves the passions. We educate the heart, teach it what to love, honor, cherish, and aspire toward. This is the motive power for all the rest. Fundamentally, the conflict is about whether students should be educated to have an allegiance to the historic American nation and its institutions, or whether they should be educated to have an allegiance to a notion of “justice” and to an egalitarian ethic that fundamentally seeks to critique those institutions, radically reform them, or replace them altogether.