anti-state * anti-war * pro-market
By: John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute
Date: 27 August 2014
The Final Nail in the Coffin: The Death of Freedom in Our Schools
Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week
of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by
his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of
fictional Facebook statuses, the 16-year-old wrote, “I killed my
neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.”
What followed is par for the course in schools today:
students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police
searched Stone’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with
disorderly conduct, arrested him, detained him, and then he was
suspended from school. No weapons or dead dinosaurs were found.
Keshana Wilson, a 14-year-old student at a Pennsylvania
high school, was tasered in the groin by a police officer working as a
school resource officer, allegedly because she resisted arrest for
cursing, inciting a crowd of students, and walking on the highway. “The
teenager had to be taken to hospital to have the taser probes removed
before she was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on the
officer, simple assault, riot, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct,
failure to disperse and walking on the highway,” noted one reporter.
Rounding out the lesson in compliance, police officers
who patrol schools in Compton, Calif., are now authorized to buy
semi-automatic AR-15 rifles and carry them in their patrol car trunks
while on duty. A few states away, in Missouri, a new state law actually
requires that all school districts participate in live-action school
shooting drills, including realistic gunfire, students covered in fake
blood, and bodies strewn throughout the hallways.
Now these incidents may seem light years away from the
all-too-grim reality of the events that took place in Ferguson,
Missouri, but they are, in fact, mere stops along the way to the
American police state. As such, parents with kids returning to school
would do well to consider these incidents fair warning, because today’s
public schools have become microcosms of the world beyond the
schoolhouse gates, and increasingly, it’s a world hostile to freedom.
Indeed, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
within America’s public schools can be found almost every aspect of the
American police state that plagues those of us on the “outside”: metal
detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police, drug-sniffing dogs,
tasers, cyber-surveillance, random searches, senseless arrests, jail
time, the list goes on.
Whether it takes the form of draconian zero tolerance
policies, overreaching anti-bullying statutes, police officers charged
with tasering and arresting so-called unruly children, standardized
testing with its emphasis on rote answers, political correctness, or the
extensive surveillance systems cropping up in schools all over the
country, young people in America are first in line to be indoctrinated
into compliant citizens of the new American police state.
Zero tolerance policies,
which punish all offenses severely, no matter how minor, condition
young people to steer clear of doing anything that might be considered
out of line, whether it’s pointing their fingers like a gun, drawing on
their desks, or chewing their gum too loudly.
Surveillance technologies,
used by school officials, police, NSA agents, and corporate entities to
track the everyday activities of students, accustom young people to
life in an electronic concentration camp, with all of their movements
monitored, their interactions assessed, and their activities recorded
and archived.
Metal
detectors at school entrances and armed police patrolling high school,
middle school and sometimes even elementary school hallways acclimatize
young people to being viewed as suspects. The presence of these police
officers in the schools also results in greater numbers of students
being arrested or charged with crimes for nonviolent, childish behavior.
All too often, these incidents remain on students’ permanent records,
impacting college and job applications.
Weapons of compliance,
such as tasers which deliver electrical shocks lethal enough to kill,
not only teach young people to fear the police, the face of our
militarized government, but teach them that torture is an accepted means
of controlling the population. One high school student in Texas
suffered severe brain damage and nearly died after being tasered. A
15-year-old disabled North Carolina student was tasered three times,
resulting in punctured lungs. A New York student was similarly tasered
for lying on the floor and crying.
Standardized testing and Common Core programs,
which discourage students from thinking for themselves while rewarding
them for regurgitating whatever the government dictates they should be
taught, will not only create a generation of test-takers capable of
little else but will also constitute massive data collection on
virtually every aspect of our children’s lives which will be accessed by
government agents and their corporate allies.
Overt censorship, monitoring and political correctness,
which manifest themselves in a variety of ways, from Internet filters
on school computers to sexual harassment policies, habituate young
people to a world in which nonconformist, divergent, politically
incorrect ideas and speech are treated as unacceptable or dangerous. In
such an environment, a 9-year-old boy remarking that his teacher is
“cute” can be suspended for sexual harassment, and those accused of
engaging in frowned upon behavior on social media will have their posts
and comments analyzed by a government agent.
As problematic as all of these programs are, however,
what’s really unnerving are the similarities between the American system
of public education and that of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi
Germany, with their overt campaigns of educational indoctrination. And
while those who run America’s schools may not be deliberately attempting
to raise up a generation of Hitler Youth, they are teaching young people to march in lockstep with the all-powerful government—which may be just as dangerous in the end.
In the face of such a mechanized, bureaucratic school
system that demands conformity, while punishing anyone who dares step
out of line, American school children are indeed powerless. And they
will remain helpless, powerless and in bondage to the police state
unless “we the people” set them free.
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