I understand this sort of thing is fantastic for social cohesion and has no negative consequences. (/s)
Everything turns to shit, but hey, the picket fences are white inside my gated HOA.
There are certain very basic standards that one segment wants to live with and normalize for their kids. If the other part aren't going to live up to them, you're never going to get social cohesion anyway. It isn't the people from the HOA community who are going to the ghetto and tagging it with graffiti or littering with used drug needles.
On the subject of children and what they are raised to learn and value, the country also happens to be allergic to instilling a common, non-toxic civic culture. It chants the pledge of allegiance before it's old enough to understand half the words like a prayer or a magical incantation, without ever taking the time to drill down or stand behind any of the values it purports.
PS. Drug use and abuse, shitty parenting, and poor family planning happens to a very significant degree in all communities in this country, but the consequences all those things cause are actively amplified for people living in the trailer park and on MLK way, while society bends over backwards to mitigate them for people living behind picket fences.
I see a lot of empty words around how I shouldn't identify poor behavior, but no suggestions for how we end it. "Break the cycle" okay how? Education is free and lower income areas generally have more school funding. We have programs for rent, utilities, food, medical care, and just straight cash.
How do we get people to value themselves and their families, much less something abstract like our republic? In this very thread there are people who are presumably somewhat wealthy saying e.g. divorce is fine.
Provide a bloody baseline. Every child deserves an environment they are given everything that a child needs to succeed, regardless of how fucked their home life is. The state can only control what happens outside of school so much, but it can control what happens in school.
It means transportation to and from school, or walkable access to them. It means school lunches. It means a space to work and study. It means a space that is safe and free from antisocial disruption. It means dealing with the antisocial disruption, through the counseling and support services children need.
You can't fix every broken human being, but you can not just abandon them after putting in minimal effort.
> Education is free and lower income areas generally have more school funding.
That delta is nowhere near enough, because the job of educating a child with an absolutely fucked home life is monumentally harder than one who doesn't have one. But it's necessary to do it, to work on the problem long-term.
---
> How do we get people to value themselves and their families, much less something abstract like our republic?
Teach them to be a part of their community. Put them to meaningful work that improves it. This is huge for social cohesion, and every high-cohesion society or high-cohesion subculture in a low-cohesion society does it.
For a trivial example, Japanese students don't clean their classrooms because their schools are too cheap to hire janitors. There's no shortage of that kind of work that children can meaningfully do that improves them, their environment, and their town, and gives them a reason to give a shit about it.
Clubs are another. The level of support and funding for them dramatically falls short of where they should be. They should not be an optional activity largely available and patronized by the college-application-padding upper-middle-class. They are necessary for proper development.
You can also attack the problem from the other direction - doing less to actively create broken families and households. There's an incredible perception of unfairness in society, and reasonable people will treat it the same way that they feel it treats them.
Punishment is cheap and actually quite likely to work.
I think you maybe misunderstood previous poster? They were suggesting (unless I am the one misunderstanding) that families shouldn't be able to select a school based on how rich they are, which would accomplish a much more egalitarian society, the opposite result of what you suggest.
See for example schools in Finland, where you don't get this US-style outcome of the very rich sending kids to elite schools destined to be CxOs and the very poor having no choice but to go to mostly very bad schools.
https://www.techclass.com/resources/education-insights/are-t...