Turning Our Schools into Enclaves of Totalitarianism

John W. Whitehead

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

Looking at America’s public schools today, it may be difficult to imagine that they were once considered the hope of freedom and democracy. According to a report by the Acton Institute:

Ninety-five percent of American 17-year-olds cannot read well enough to understand technical materials and literary essays. This means that only about 5 percent of America’s 17-year-olds can read well enough to understand the Bible… Almost one-third of 17-year-olds do not know that Columbus discovered the New World before 1750!

Many public schools, now equipped with barbed wire, metal detectors and police roaming the halls, look more like prisons than institutions of higher learning. And with the implementation of draconian zero tolerance policies, children have been suspended for innocently bringing mouthwash, aspirin, nail clippers, lemon drops and the like to school.

The horrific lesson being taught to our young people—by the very school officials we have entrusted to shape them into tomorrow’s leaders—is that the government has absolute power over its citizens. As a result, young people have very little freedom at all. If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in the schools is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.

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