Grew up in Alabama. Was regularly given detention, written up, or straight up insulted by teachers and threatened by students for not standing during the pledge. This around 6th-7th grade during the Bush years.

One school I went to had a "moment of prayer" every morning where before home room they gave you like 5 minutes to pray or whatever. I used it to play with my tech decks hell yeah. This was a public school way out in the sticks in a town with a population of 1,200. Other kids used to make fun of me for being a "city boy" even though the town I moved there from only had 30,000 people.

Uh, lots of American exceptionalism. For like 2 months straight, right after 9/11 and the Afghanistan/Iraq invasion, most of our classes were just the teacher bringing out a TV and turning on the news to watch live coverage of the war. No curriculum, no teaching, just watching American imperialism distilled through talking heads on whatever news channel had the best drone footage of "combatants" being bombed from 12,000 ft.