re: #84 A Mom Anon

Socialization comes with being in social situations. Classrooms do provide some of that, and there would be more positive interactions in classrooms that had more hands on learning and project oriented assignments. Socialization seems to mean for some people at least, goofing off and yapping about what you saw on tv last night.

I totally believe that if you sat down liberal and conservative parents and just told them what the goal was, to better educate their kids and have a good end result without making it a fucking political team sport that there would be much disagreement regardless of politics. Anyone who says they don’t want their kid prepped for college or some sort of tech/vocational career path once they graduate is a lying sack of crap. Decent parents ALL want a good path forward for their kids, regardless of politics.

That has some truth to it, but the problem is that the politics are reflective of other issues as well. Liberals from Wisconsin might well look down on conservatives from Mississippi, thinking them hicks living in a backwards state, and that impulse to look down would lead them to denigrate the latter’s ideas. The Mississippians, for their part, would have their own reasons for hostility, though theirs would be less based on current circumstances and more based on “Your ancestors burned my ancestors’ farm down and took our livestock and slaves away!”.

The politics is only part of larger cultural conflicts.