"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Public Schools = Jim Crow for Kids
Jerry Farber on students as the victim of hatred and bigotry.
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Very powerful article. And being written in 1969, it doesn't even begin to address the armed guards, surveillance cameras, lockdowns, strip searches, random drug tests, visits from drug dogs and "zero-tolerance" policies that constitute a major part of today's public education. My kids used to complain that their schools "looked like prisons." In the ten years between my youngest child and my oldest grandchild, however, the schools have actually BECOME mini-penal institutions. And not one kid in 100 could tell you where Vietnam is.
As we near the end of Black History Month, I find it ironic that while focusing on the strides toward racial equality that the government claims to promote, there is no question that children are being educated (or rather conditioned) into the cult of the state, where the state rules supreme. If you think that you have freedom, look at these aerial photos of a prison and a high school and tell me that we have not reached true equality, if only by ensuring that we willingly fund governments that systematically process the populations of prisons and schools the exact same way.
Image of Pelican Bay Supermax Prison
Image of Auburn High School
We may as well tell our kids to look forward to building license plates as inmates of a prison, or working in a cubicle as an employee of a cold, corporate-statist system that truly looks at the vast majority of its citizenry as slaves. This current two party monopoly running our country see this as a win-win because the poor will not get poorer and the rich will not get richer. It only matters that the state promotes the collective-hive mentality that it does so well. Go to work collating the financial report or stamping out a license plate... then return to your cubicle or return to your cell, respectively. It is a tragedy that the kids of today will have only the choice to either sell their soul to the state, or have it taken from them.