Public schools are the regime’s factory floor
Nothing boils my blood more than public schools. Not just because I attended them and I know what they’re like, but because they’re the right arm of the State.
Christopher Cook of The Freedom Scale didn’t exaggerate when he called public schools “Prussian-model homogenization factories.”
These prisons are laboratories of obedience. It turns spirited, curious children into predictable, deferential adults who believe their freedom comes with an asterisk.
The American public-school model was imported wholesale from the 19th-century Prussian empire, a system designed to create loyal soldiers, submissive clerks, and citizens incapable of questioning the crown.
Horace Mann called it “the great equalizer.” What he meant was equal in thought, compliance, and mediocrity.
Today’s “education” bureaucracy still serves the same purpose; it just changed uniforms. The bayonets are gone, the social-credit points are digital, and administrators brought up learning collectivism manage the empire.
Myth of the benevolent blackboard
The regime sold parents a fairy tale that public education was about opportunity and fairness. But fairness, in State language, means sameness. It forces children into studying the same subjects at nearly the same pacing and the same core worldview.
The “benevolence” is a mask for central control. Just look at the architecture of typical public schools. They’re brick fortresses with gates, bells, and surveillance cameras, with rows of desks facing the authority at the front.
We’re told this is preparation for the “real world.” That’s the most honest thing the regime ever said, because the real world they built does demand conformity, submission, and silent tolerance of absurdity. Too bad they don’t teach you how to handle yourself in the real world…
Public schools kill curiosity
Cook’s disgust at teachers’ self-pity is justified, but the deeper tragedy lies in what their institutions destroy: Curiosity.
Children enter school with boundless wonder, and if you don’t believe me, flash back to your kindergarten days. By middle school, most are too beaten down to care. Again, if you don’t believe me, go back to middle school this time.
The machine rewards obedience and punishes imagination. It trains kids to memorize for approval, not to think critically.
Ask a twelve-year-old what excites them, and you’ll often hear silence. They’ve already learned that excitement gets them labeled as “disruptive,” internalized that every question must have one official answer, and that creativity is chaos. Trust me on that last one…
Worst yet, the regime erases potential competitors. A child who learns to think independently might one day refuse to subsidize bureaucrats. That’s a threat to the system’s survival.
Homeschoolers, unschoolers, and entrepreneurial educators have proven what voluntary learning can do. A handful of families, free from the State’s script, routinely outperform billion-dollar districts.
Why? They teach reality, not rhetoric, while adapting to the student, not the bell schedule. These people prove that education thrives only when it’s liberated from compulsion.
The bureaucrat pipeline
Cook nailed the economic side: The State monopolizes the job market through credentialism and crowding out. Once you make the government the largest employer, servitude becomes rational.
Consider the incentives. A bright student sees limited private-sector openings because regulation has strangled entrepreneurship. So they “play it safe,” major in education, get a union-protected job, and feed the machine that fed them. Their salary may or may not be mediocre, but the pension and job security make up for it. And that pension comes directly from the pockets of workers who don’t get one.
The system rewards dependency, and that’s how it perpetuates itself. Every teacher, administrator, and “diversity coordinator” has a vested interest in defending the public-school myth, because their comfort depends on it.
When reformers promise “change from within,” they’re either lying or deluded. You can’t reform a borderline monopoly that exists to protect itself.
The incentive structure is the problem through and through. It’s a bureaucracy funded regardless of results, where every failure justifies another budget increase. Imagine if grocery stores operated this way, and every spoiled tomato earns the manager a raise.
That’s education in America.
Erosion of responsibility
Public schools teach the first lesson of socialism: Your outcome is someone else’s problem. If you fail, it’s the system’s fault. If you succeed, you owe it to the system.
The purpose, ultimately, is to equalize outcomes. Again, go back to your school days, and you’ll remember that everyone who didn’t drop out graduated with a diploma. The State can’t tolerate excellence because excellence exposes the lie of equality. The competent must be penalized so the incompetent feel included.
Slap the phrase “Honors Graduate” for the former and it’ll make them feel important. But at the end of the day, it means absolutely nothing.
The result is moral rot. Adults who’ve never faced genuine accountability don’t suddenly develop it at twenty-five. They carry that mindset into the workforce and politics, transforming into the bureaucrats, union reps, and politicians Cook described. The ones who still think a tax levy or sensitivity training will solve every problem.
In a free market, failure is feedback. In the public sector, failure is fuel. The worse the performance, the louder the call for funding. This inversion of logic is the regime’s masterpiece to convince (or coerce) taxpayers to bankroll their own degradation.
Cultural infantilization
We live in an era where adults require “safe spaces,” emotional-support animals, and trigger warnings, all extensions of the school mentality. The bell schedule becomes the corporate calendar, the guidance counselor becomes HR, while detention is cancellation.
The regime doesn’t need jackboots when it has shame and dependency. The average citizen now apologizes for existing, terrified of offending the same bureaucratic caste that lives off his labor. Permanent adolescence is the the endgame for all public schools. People who never graduate from needing permission.
A child who spends thirteen years being told what to think will grow up begging for someone to tell them what to believe. That’s why propaganda works, and why “trust the experts” replaced “think for yourself.” It’s cultural conditioning at its absolute worst.
The parent as the rebel against public schools
Cook called government teachers “regime slaves.” I’ll go further: The parents who still feed their children into that machine, year after year, are unwilling accomplices. Many of them mean well, but good intentions don’t erase moral cowardice.
If your neighbor’s factory was producing intellectual poison, you wouldn’t keep buying the product out of habit. Yet millions of parents continue doing just that, because it’s convenient, “free,” and socially acceptable. That’s the true triumph of the regime — turning obedience into virtue and dissent into selfishness.
The moment a parent withdraws their child from public school, the regime loses control. That’s why they treat homeschooling families like cult members.
The education cartels know that whoever controls the child controls the future. The only effective resistance is secession, whether it’s educational, economic, and moral. Every new micro-school, co-op, or homeschool pod is a declaration of independence.
Parents often say, “I can’t afford to homeschool.” But the real question is: Can you afford not to? Every year your child spends in that system deepens financial, intellectual, and spiritual debt. The price of convenience means the ownership of your child’s mind.
The automatism of obedience
Cook’s closing point that “normal people don’t think about the immorality of the regime because they were educated in the regime’s schools” is devastating. It’s total automation. You don’t need active evil when you have passive compliance.
Think of the COVID years. Millions of teachers gleefully enforced mask mandates, social isolation, and experimental medical compliance all under the banner of “safety.” They obeyed, because that’s what the system trained them to do.
When you condition generations to equate morality with rule-following, you no longer need censors because people censor themselves. That’s the Prussian dream realized through American progressivism.
Withdrawal as the only moral stance
There is no reform path for institutions built on coercion. You can’t fix serfdom, but you can abolish it. You can’t redeem public schools because their foundations are immoral: they exist through force. Property taxes fund them under threat of foreclosure, and they mandate attendance under the threat of prosecution while rendering consent irrelevant.
The only moral stance left is exit. Stop funding, legitimizing, and apologizing for wanting something better. The regime feeds on quiet compliance, and the moment enough people walk away, it starves.
Cook’s anger is righteous, but anger isn’t enough. Refusal must follow with mass civil disobedience through education. Teach your children privately, voluntarily, and cooperatively. Let learning be the market it was always meant to be, with a thousand decentralized, parent-driven schools that would outperform every billion-dollar district combined.
Freedom in education isn’t a luxury for the rich. It’s the baseline for a moral civilization. Every society that centralizes learning eventually centralizes thought, and every society that centralizes thought ends in submission.
The bell and the chain
Every morning, a bell rings in 98,000 public schools across America. Children stand, recite loyalty to a piece of cloth, and begin their day under fluorescent light. Parents call it normal, teachers call it noble, and politicians call it progress. But that bell is a summons — the sound of ownership being reaffirmed.
Christopher Cook is right to hate the system. Hate is the appropriate response to tyranny disguised as compassion. We need to hate public schools and everything associated with the State, but hatred alone won’t break the chain. Withdrawal will.
The parent who finally refuses to send their child into that building commits a revolutionary act. They’ve unplugged one mind from the matrix, reclaimed one future from the State, and declared that education belongs to families, not regimes.
The next revolution won’t start with muskets or ballots. It will start when enough parents hear the bell and choose, at last, not to answer.
So, what am I doing about it? Writing books. One is called The Arcane Prophecy, whose theme is, you guessed it: Free market education. It tells a compelling story where Harry Potter entwines with Chaos Theory, but the message runs deeper.
Read the first three chapters now, and embark on a journey to Arcane Elemental Academy, where 32 schools under the academy’s umbrella compete for students every single day.
