Jeff D. Opdyke
Activist Post
A modern historian looking to chronicle the destruction of the America we all once knew could do no better than to deconstruct the U.S. education system today.
Along with providing American students a middling education at best — we rank 17th in the world and well-below-average for developed nations — what’s really wrong with America’s education system is the fact that we’re engineering the next generation to become acclimated to what this country is becoming …
And it’s becoming a police state, where tolerance is zero and everyone is presumed guilty. The notion of innocence? To hell with that!
This will not end well for you or me, or our children.
As a parent — I have two kids in school — I am always on the lookout for examples of governmental transgressions … so these days, of course, I am paying an inordinate amount of attention to American school systems. In few domestic settings will you find such misconduct (and downright ignorance) percolating through our country.
Can It Get Any Worse Than This?
Consider these three solutions taken recently in America’s schools to address so-called deviant acts of misbehavior:
1. Threaten to hold back a straight-A student for serving her country. A 13-year-old, straight-A student in the Washington D.C. school system was recently labeled a truant. Her crime: excelling at the piano. The young girl is so gifted musically that she has played around the world and was hand-picked to serve as an international music ambassador by a prestigious foundation. So, she travels a good bit. But … she has maintained straight-A grades anyway. Though the D.C. school district does have the ability to override its attendance policy for extenuating circumstances, the wise owls atop the failing district decided that being a prodigy on a global level just doesn’t cut the mustard.
2. Arrest a frightened teenager for checking in on her sick mother. In Houston, a teenager at Sam Houston High was using her cellphone to deal with a family emergency — her ill mother. The school’s assistant principal demanded the teen’s phone because of an asinine policy about cellphone usage on campus. The teen refused because — again — she was dealing with a family emergency. But the assistant principal, displaying an amazing grasp of rationality, had already called for back-up — the police! And thus it was that a 4’10”, 70-pound girl, upset about her ill mother, found herself on the ground, the victim of jackbooted oppression. One cop pressed his knee on her skull while a second sat on her legs and handcuffed her. A third loomed nearby — you know, just in case the 4’10”, 70-pound villain overpowered the two substantially larger men of law and order.3. Throw a student in detention for sharing his lunch. Remember that golden rule you learned as a kid: Sharing is caring? Well, not so much in Weaverville, California. For his act of kindness — sharing part of his chicken burrito with a friend who was hungry — a 13-year-old boy landed in detention. “It seemed like he couldn’t get a normal lunch,” the teen told a local TV station, “so I just wanted to give mine to him because I wasn’t really that hungry and it was just going to go in the garbage if I didn’t eat it.” To which the school responded that sharing food is prohibited because of food allergies and whatnot. That’s a legitimate reason … but detention is not a legitimate response to a non-crime. Weaverville, have you ever considered pulling the student aside to explain why the policy is in place instead of rushing to punish an act of kindness?
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Such events, and scores of similar episodes in schools all over the country that I haven’t the space to chronicle, serve as a microcosm of so much that is wrong with America today … and it hints at a future that is so clearly heading our way.
As a country, we have become intolerant of any action that questions authority — a byproduct of the terror-laced world that government shoves down our throat with almost every news cycle. It’s as though Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is cranking out fear-mongering stories somewhere in the bowels of metropolitan D.C.
Epochal changes in society do not happen quickly. They’re reprogrammed at a generational pace. My generation is too American to accept what’s going on. We grew up in a tolerant America, where innocence was assumed. It was far freer than the America my kids are inheriting. There was the ever-present belief that change could be affected for the better across the country. The American Dream was still very much alive, instead of the withered, disillusioned shadow that it has now become.
But tomorrow’s Americans, I fear, will not have the same values. And, I fear, it’s because of the schools and what’s going on inside them.
School systems, it seems to me, are inculcating our kids to accept an ever-present police state as a normal state of affairs. And it’s a police state that is otherwise benign except in those moments when its authority is questioned … and then it becomes ruthless in meting out justice on the fly. Kids learn quickly.
And before you know it, you have a generation of Stepford Americans who are submissive, compliant and reticent to question authority.
Seems the perfect world for an Orwellian government that wants its people to believe they are free, despite the obvious cages built around them.
That’s why my generation will regularly rail against the malevolence of modern government … or they will increasingly abandon ship for more hospitable locales, as a record number of Americans are doing, searching for a place that holds true to the values that our country was built upon.
Related Activist Post Articles:
Breaking Bread: Student Punished for Sharing Lunch
Psych Experiment Tricks Students Into Believing in Non-Existent Career