> I'm not sure if this is true for all public schools, but my old K-8 encouraged normal thinking, of whatever the opposite of free is.
> "Yay! You wrote the exact same paper as the rest of the class! Gold stars all around! Except for you, _____-- for your essay, entitled The Way the Pilgrims Really Treated the Indians: Separatists in the New World, which is NOT the heading I gave you, I sentence you to fifteen years of Re-education!" [Men in uniforms appear from shadows, dragging the screaming third grader away]. His/her parents are deemed unfit and their children are taken into custody.

Hmm. In my school, environmentalism was the word of the aeon. Everything was about how anything that might change anything was by definition bad. If anyone should for any reason perhaps suggest that there are certain sacrifices that should - or, less than that, that could safely - be made for the sake of progress or because there might be interests other than preserving the environment around he was burned as a witch and had his ashes scattered to the four winds.