Product of culture

So I was thinking about my childhood, how I was brought up, my educational experiences and social education. And the reality is I was really a product of wannabe hippie's. Although neither of my parents went full blown into the long hair, Tye died clothing etc. Much of their approach was influenced by the late '60's counterculture. The first school I attended was the Community School of Colorado Springs, which in essence was a bunch of parents getting together and building their own school, It was very much a hippie school. There was very little structure, we learned odd things for our age: sex ed for kindergarten, dissecting frogs in 1st/2nd grade. Much of what we learned about other people, genders etc. is embodied in the music, book and TV show Free to Be... You and Me (for more info go here):
Free to Be… You and Me - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Then in junior high and high school I went to the Colorado Springs School which embodied much of the same spirit, albeit with a little more structure. But the whole approach was the same and the culture was very definitely the same. This similarity was highlighted by the fact that a good number of the same kids I went to the Community School with attended CSS, including one of the teachers who taught at both schools.

Then I went off to CU Boulder, where I spent a good chunk of the time rebelling against my whole liberal upbringing: shaving my head, hanging out with punks and skinheads, voting Republican, generally taking extreme Right wing views. When the movie Flashback came out I found myself sympathizing greatly with the main character.

So fast forward 20 odd years, and now that I have kids I am finding that it is not the Right wing Republican views that I am leaning on when I teach and raise my children. It is the views of my childhood. And my politics in general have changed from the very conservative to the liberal side of things.

The point of all of this is that while people tend to get very bent out of shape when their children start to rebel and do dumb things, if you raised them right, the chances are they will return to the values you teach them when they are young. And while I kid my parents about the seemingly odd choices they made for me, it definitely turned out all right.