Do You Feel Your School and Teachers Welcome Both Conservative and Liberal Points of View?

(warning: very opinionated)

No. I think that it's either impossible or rather extremely hard to be welcome to both conservatives and liberals. I've seen both spectrums myself; I live in a small town with mostly conservatives, and it is them and not the school that creates the school culture. My grade and middle school were always striving to be as neutral as possible on things, not trying to be either conservative or liberal with school decisions. However, the students and teachers (who were almost all conservative) would interpret all of the school's actions as conservative. If the principal would mention something liberal, the students would say "oh, they're just saying that. Can't blame them" or something along those lines. At Uni, the majority of students and teachers are openly liberal which is much, much different than my old school. Seeing both conservative and liberal cultures in school has given me a lot of perspective on politics, and I'm very glad that I have seen both spectrums.

One thing that I notice with both political spectrums is - both sides really don't understand each other, which is quite sad to me. Things that my conservative classmates would consider very far left were really not that far left, and things that my liberal classmates would consider very far right are really not that far right. A good example of this is Trump vs. Biden. At my old school, most people were pro-trump and “biden-voter” was considered an insult. It is the opposite at Uni, and calling someone a trump supporter can be an insult. However, according to the actual voting results, 74 million people voted for Trump and 81 million voted for Biden. Neither Trump or Biden voters are rare. Another very controversial topic is abortion. Pro-life and Pro-choice labels are comparable to the previous analogy, and this as well is still a very evenly split topic among Amercians. In reality, the split is about 53% to 47% according to a poll by politico. There are very controversial issues such as abortion, Trump vs. Biden, racism, homophobia, mask mandates, and many more that neither side seem to be able to have a peaceful conversation about. I don't think I've ever witnessed a peaceful conversation between two different sides on these topics. The only peaceful conversation I've seen with these topics were ones where people were agreeing with each other. 

My personal political spectrum has been playing ping pong with itself and I genuinely don't know at this point. At the moment, the only firm belief I have is the disbelief in "conservatism" "liberalism", "Left or right" or any other categories of politics. The only thing I really believe is that the ideas of left and right are only used today because people love to disagree with each other. I don't say this like it's a fundamentally bad thing - arguing with people and feeling like I have the right opinion and everyone else is dumb feels great. I won't lie, it feels great. Listening to political commentators preach about politics, preaching about how stupid people on the other side are, makes me feel great. Is it beneficial? Is it making me form an unbiased, informed, or helpful opinion at all? Of course not, but it sure does feel great to feel like I’m the only one with the right opinion.

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Now, to answer the actual question. In my opinion, no, I don’t feel that my school and teachers are welcome to both conservative and liberal points of view. I don’t really like the question since there is much more to politics than conservatism and liberalism, and the question is whether I “feel” that the school and teachers are “welcome”, which are both very subjective. It also implies that the teachers and school have a lot to do with the student political culture. When coming to Uni in subbie year, I identified and believed that I was conservative and had conservative points of view, and I disagreed with a lot of my peers on many subjects. Hearing many different perspectives was valuable to me, and I’m very glad that my points of view were challenged. However, I did not feel this way at the time. I did not feel comfortable sharing my opinions at all, and felt very pressured to agree with everyone else. All of my peers who talked about politics had different beliefs than me, and I nodded and smiled whenever anyone talked about how stupid, racist, or homophobic republicans and conservatives are. Internally, I took a lot of offense to it, but I didn’t have the courage to say anything. When political issues are talked about by teachers, at least in my experience at Uni, they have been one hundred percent liberal. There is a large presence of criticizing radical right ideas, but almost no criticism of radical left ideas.

With all this said, it may come off as though I believe that there is a political problem at Uni because of the school and teachers. On the contrary, I don’t think that it is a problem, or rather it is so small and unsolvable that it isn’t a problem. While there may be subtle hints by the school and teachers, they never directly discourage disagreement, never directly take a stance and discourage conservatism, and even sometimes, albeit not often, encourage taking the other side’s point of view. The problem I had with speaking about my political beliefs wasn’t because of the teachers and school lack of welcomeness to conservatives, but solely because of other student’s views. And, obviously, all students are and should be completely entitled to their own opinion. After all, if there really was a huge problem with political welcome at Uni I wouldn’t be able to write this blog.

https://www.270towin.com/2020_Election/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/abortion-polls-are-garbage/