How Public Schools have become Orwellian Prisons
Public schools are careening toward a true dystopian novel setting with spying, informants, pat-downs, check-points, and double-speak manipulations.
Please share this video today with someone who is currently in a public middle or high school. They need to hear this message and know that there are people who empathize with their plight and are working to stop the tyranny.
In George Orwell’s masterpiece novel, “1984,” the population in the fictional country of Oceania is held hostage both physically and psychologically by a totalitarian regime.
This regime attempts to control all people through a robust system of spying, propaganda, and physical control. Commerce, language, and thought itself is controlled to ensure compliance from the unwittingly enslaved.
A key control tactic in this Orwellian dystopia is the use of “double-speak,” that is, the manipulation of words through fear to get the population to not only be complicit with their enslavement, but to actively beg for it and threaten those who otherwise demand freedom.
The popularized ruling party mantra from 1984, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” has never seen a greater presence in the lives of young people than in the public schools today.
I am going to share with you three key descriptive facts that highlight how public schools have effectively become Orwellian prisons following the ruling party mantra in pushing children to accept and beg for their own captivity.
The first key element, “War is peace,” describes how children are kept in a constant state of fear, like the people of Oceana, so that they can be controlled.
In 1984, the population was constantly told that they were under threats from foreign government attacks and, thus, they had to be monitored and disarmed for their own safety.
Likewise, children face a bombardment of threat propaganda in both a broader national sense and a localized sense with a never-ending War on Terror and a growing fear of school shooters.
Children in public school today have no idea what it is like to not be at war as the War on Terror in the Middle East has been waging on for more than 18 years.
The constant propaganda pushed onto them in their lesson plans and in the mainstream media has them growing up with the norm that being at war is a routine part of life that should be accepted to fight the looming boogeyman of terrorism.
In addition, schools have now implemented internal fear-based training with constant drills for attacks within the school.
Harvard University professor David Ropeik notes that the odds of a child being shot and killed in a school shooting event is roughly 1-in-614 million, making it statistically less likely than one’s chances of being killed by lightning.
Despite this rarity, nearly all public schools in the U.S. have conducted a routine type of lockdown drill since 2015, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Even NPR reporters have noted that the drills, some complete with simulated gunfire, are doing more harm than good because it is causing irrational fear and anxiety.
So the question is why is such a rare event being drilled into students at large, causing them not only inconvenience, but irrational fear?
The answer to that is simple: control.
If young people are kept in a constant state of fear, they are more easily manipulated into believing that being controlled is good and that having police dressed in tactical gear, testing out their military-surplus equipment, is a good thing.
By getting young people scared, politicians are ripening them to give up more of their civil liberties as they reach adulthood.
As Orwell warned of in his book, fear would be used to keep people in a constant state of panic so that they are more readily controlled.
The second propaganda element, “Freedom is Slavery,” is clearly a part of the schooling experience as young people’s rights to their bodies, property, and privacy are routinely violated under lowered standards of fourth amendment protections.
Young people are told that they must give up their freedom in this seemingly scary world so that they can be made safe.
This comes in the forms of: police and administrators having a lower standard of reasonable suspicion to search; metal detectors and drug dogs positioned at the entrance of schools; spying on and monitoring students from hallway cameras; computer keyloggers; and demands to access students’ social media accounts.
Increasingly, students are being told that their safety must come at the expense of their privacy and that this is what true “freedom” looks like.
With these intrusions, coupled with state demands to report any child who appears sad or unusual as a threat, school grounds have become ground zero for state informants.
The last element, “Ignorance is Strength,” is seen most readily in the steep decline in reading comprehension and basic math fluency in students.
With the implementation of common core standards, the use of sight-reading instead of phonics, and a shift in focus from debate over philosophy in the classroom to rote memorization of contemporary social justice issues, young people have become proverbially “dumbed down” to the point that many entering college need remedial English and math classes before they can get into their majors.
This deliberate dumbing down is quite intentional, as noted by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement under Reagan.
She notes that schooling curriculums have less to do with developing young people’s ability to reason and think critically through Socratic dialogue and exploration of philosophy than with getting young people to memorize and regurgitate what those in power want young people to believe by the time they graduate.
Over time, this leads to the creation of straight “A” students whose real underlying accomplishment is obedience and compliance to the demands of state bureaucrats.
They are confused into thinking that being “intelligent” is repeating back whatever those in seeming authority tell them and, accordingly, are rewarded with positions in government and academia to then re-promulgate the talking points of those who wish to maintain control over the population.
In this manner, “Ignorance” becomes the “Strength” of maintaining the government hierarchy of acceptable discourse.
As you can see, the public school paradigm is a terrifying one that has and will continue to lead, ultimately, to dumbed-down young people demanding an end to free speech and property rights in favor of central planning for the sake of supposed “safety.”
The ethical exit is one where young people are freed from these coercive institutions and are, instead, allowed to freely direct their education with adults acting as helpers instead of controllers.
If you’d like to see what the anti-Orweillian education paradigm looks like, search up the term “Self-Directed Education” or “Unschooling” and visit the self-directed education advocacy website, https://www.self-directed.org/.
Sources
WAR IS PEACE
Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/05/18/heres-how-much-of-your-life-the-united-states-has-been-at-war/
Experts Worry Active Shooter Drills In Schools Could Be Traumatic For Students
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/778015261/experts-worry-active-shooter-drills-in-schools-could-be-traumatic-for-students
Harvard Professor on Statistics of School Shooting Events
https://www.the74million.org/lessons-from-our-year-tracking-school-shootings-students-more-likely-to-be-hit-by-lightning-than-shot-in-class-yet-fear-of-mass-violence-is-driving-policy/
Lightning Strikes
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds
Nat Geo WILD: What Are the Odds? Some Surprising Shark Attack Stats
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2011/11/22/nat-geo-wild-what-are-the-odds-some-surprising-shark-attack-stats/
National Center for Education Statistics – nearly all public schools have routine lockdown drills:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=54
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
ACLU OF MICHIGAN SUES SCHOOL DISTRICT OVER STRIP SEARCH OF STUDENTS
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-michigan-sues-school-district-over-strip-search-students
Passwords: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/02/18/schools-weigh-access-to-students-social-media.html
The Right to Search Students
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec01/vol59/num04/The-Right-to-Search-Students.aspx
When School Feels Like Prison
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/when-school-feels-like-prison/499556/
How Parkland students feel about their new mandatory clear backpacks
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/02/us/marjory-stoneman-douglas-clear-backpacks/index.html
U.S. Secret Service Wants Schools To Treat Unhappy Students as Potential Violent Threats
https://reason.com/2019/11/13/u-s-secret-service-wants-schools-to-treat-unhappy-students-as-potential-violent-threats/
Say Something Program
https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/say-something
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children
https://amzn.to/36VtEhu
Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do about It
https://amzn.to/32wIwj2
NAEP 2019: Reading scores drop for US students, with mixed math results
https://www.educationdive.com/news/naep-2019-reading-scores-drop-for-us-students-with-mixed-math-results/566090/
Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure
https://thefederalist.com/2017/10/25/bill-gates-tacitly-admits-common-core-experiment-failure/
First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/31/first-common-core-high-school-grads-worst-prepared-for-college-in-15-years/
Most colleges enroll many students who aren’t prepared for higher education
https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-enroll-students-arent-prepared-higher-education/
Remedial Education
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2016/09/28/144000/remedial-education/
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education
https://amzn.to/2Kb2wl8
The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
https://amzn.to/2Q75bQl
Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom
https://amzn.to/32yZa1l
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Interesting. I just wrote my own little piece about how politics in general has ruined public education: https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2019/11/25/how-politics-ruined-public-education/
Complete with Orwellian revision of the curricula in two different states!
I would say we differ in that I am against public (state) education. It is inherently political and it is inherently oppressive due to the coercion in attendance and the force in learning.
To see an ethical alternative, visit http://self-directed.org
Keep politics out of education, definitely. If more people were interested in not simply dropping their children off at daycare, then I'd agree with your position completely. Apathy is a big problem here. Social needs are another: I know someone who homeschooled both of her kids until recently, when her teenage son asked to be put in public school so that he could spend more time with his friends. If people are going to choose the state-run option, then it should still be available, but it needs to be fixed (torn down and re-built would more appropriate at this point).
Maybe I'm grasping at straws; I've always been a loner, so homeschooling worked just fine for me.
lmao