and so why doesn't our school system prepare kids to grow into adult citizens who embrace and celebrate difference, and succeed as originals rather than clones (I thought conservatives were AGAINST human cloning??)

It's not a trick question or test question, it's immediate and real-world: which way does your own liberal education and intellect "compel" you to lean on the issue of school compulsion and coercion? Does school meet its own huge ideological burden anymore? Is it perhaps time that "liberal-leaning" thinkers re-think what education is and how to create it, to test our own beliefs and expert analysis under our own intellectual standards, in light of new evidence and old disappointments?