Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of community that really does rely on common goals and shared values.

It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed to measure the relative strength of factions with precision. Such structures rely on hierarchies, constitutions, parliamentary procedure, and voting.

Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?

I think it represents an attempt to delineate a boundary. It's a search for a way to define what is "encyclopedic", i.e., important enough to be included in the encyclopedia.

Is your local high school notable? Maybe not to me, but to your community it is. The school, its doings, its and so forth, might have more impact on your community than city hall. The policies of the principal and faculty, the coaching philosophy of the football team, can have far reaching effects.

I daresay a school would be more important than a rock band. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there are two public high schools. (For you Britishers, this is "public" in the sense of being financed by the government and subject to the rulings of an elected School Committee. They don't charge tuition to residents.) Probably as many as half of the Cambridge's 100,000 residents attend one of these two schools.

So policy choices like having Zero Tolerance for drug abuse (or letting kids sell drugs in the hall ways); abstinence education or "here's how to have fun in bed"; civics classes that emphasize personal responsibility and helping others vs. "here's how to make the gov't serve you more"; etc., have far ranging consequences.

I would like to know a lot more about what's going on in my hometown high schools.

Ed Poor