Schools and universities are ground zero for America’s culture war

Perry Phimosis said:
When I started undergrad I was still kinda like my parents. I thought Ronald Reagan was OK! My views changed over time and I became more and more liberal...but not because of anything I was learning in university.. No, it was from talking and listening to different people. Learning new ways to look at stuff by seeing outside of the bubble I had been raised in.

Over time I gave up the soft form of racism that pervaded much of my home town. I gave up my homophobia as I learned that I had some friends who were gay.

In short: I GREW UP.

And I'm thankful for all the friends and associates who helped open my eyes over the years. But none of it came from the classroom.
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Beautiful post. Your history sounds like my husband's. He was born and raised on a farm in rural mid-state Illinois. He's the only one of the six kids in their family to leave the area and move to a large city when he graduated university. I wouldn't say that he's liberal, at least not to the extent that I am. But he IS open-minded, accepting of ppl not like himself, and 100% on the side of higher education because it opens both minds and opportunities. In his career (IT) he worked with and learned to appreciate people who had totally different backgrounds, including not being born in the U.S. When I first met him, he had a dim view of black ppl in general, other than the few he worked with. He thought that they lacked ambition. Then he met my friends and found out just the opposite. I don't think he would have changed his POV had he not escaped the insular place where a lot of his siblings still live. It wasn't his university that changed him; it was life.
 
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