I have been teaching in a jr. or sr. high school for almost 22 years now.
When I first started teaching, we hammered the students that they needed to go to college to increase their possibilities of success.
So we got a glut of students in college increasing their knowledge and maybe influencing their thought processes along the way. Those college educated people got jobs in cities and live their lives just fine.
In the last 10 years or so, we have really hammered that college isn't for everyone and that they don't have to go to college to be successful. They can go to a trade school, start a business, but that there are more options and don't feel badly if you do not attend college.
So the amount of students not attending a four year college has gone down some, and those people usually live where the jobs are, in rural, less populated areas.
Now we are seeing an ever increasing political divide.
Many think it's Democrat and Republican, but if you look at an electoral map, it's urban vs. rural.
Urban people tend to be more college educated, more "poor" minorities tend to live there and both groups tend to vote Democrat.
Rural areas tend to not have as many college educated people living there and the "poor" there often are white.
If you follow social media, which is one of my weaknesses, I see a growing anti-rural or anti-urban sentiment.
Those who live in the rural areas believe that the urban people are elite snobs and those in urban areas believe the rural people are hick racists.
It's my opinion that these feelings are being driven by having so much information at our fingertips.
How much would we actually know if we did not have 24/7 coverage on the news and social media running continuously?
But we do, so what do we do with it?
Do we guide students into college again so they can be properly educated and indoctrinated on the left politically way of thinking?
Or do we continue to send kids where they will be successful even if it means a two year degree and living in a rural area and indoctrinated on the right political way of thinking?
Or we could look at the millions and millions of people who vote for each side and not generalize that they're all elitists or they're all racists.
All that does is further the divide between the two groups, and I am sorry to say, it's the only thing I see anymore.
My fear is that we will all continue to move to the far left and to the far right stretching the middle until there is nothing left remaining. Blinded by inability to see past our own belief systems. Blinded that what we may define something as may be defined differently by someone else. And our middle will stretch so thin that we all fall down on top of each other ruining the great thing we have here in the USA, and that's a life that's better than many, many places in the world.
But what do I know?
