Will Education Become a Charging Gray Rhino?

"Gray Rhinos" are highly probable events with high impact that are mostly ignored or neglected in planning exercises (see author Michele Wucker's TED Talk or book for a more thorough explication). Think pandemic disease in 2019—or today for that matter. Highly likely, yet mostly ignored. 

One gray rhino scenario I can imagine for the education sector in the USA is that it becomes even more sharply divided along political and cultural lines, with different private, independent, and public (government) school systems (and perhaps even universities) developing distinct, culturally or politically-congruent curricula. In effect, students would learn different facts and experience different approaches to teaching and learning depending on their school. A simplistic example would be when one school might cater to parents who want their child(ren) to learn creation science while another in the same market would use evolution instead. 

A more complex example would mirror my own experience learning about the American Civil War. My Southern mother presented the Civil War as being a little about slavery but more about the North interfering with life in the South, while my New York City native father saw it as a war to end the unacceptable practice of enslaving others. To my teachers in the elementary and junior high schools I attended in the Mountain West, the Civil War was someone else's war, I.e., in 1860, it would still be decades before our territory even became a state. No wonder Americans seem to lack a common understanding of such a defining event! 

What if science—not just evolution, but climate change and the geological record, not to mention medical practices like vaccination—is taught differently in different types of schools? This might create a short-term opportunity for schools to differentiate, but I fear that in the longer run it would be both symptom and accelerant of ongoing societal fragmentation. That pretty much defines a death spiral if it happens.