Public schools have officially become glorified prisons
If you’re a parent who’s still sending your kids to public schools, you’re insane. The state and local governments are treating your child like a criminal.
A few days back, I visited my parents’ place and they had a college football game on. To me, it was background noise. I couldn’t give two shits about sports these days, even if I’ll tune in outta meager curiosity. But then a local public school commercial cut in, and that caught my eye.
Students funneled one by one through metal detectors, emptying their pockets like they were entering a prison. The voiceover called it “putting student safety first.” To me, it looked more like an indoctrination ad than an education one.
I couldn’t help but blurt out to my mother: “What kind of parent in their right mind would send their kid to a public school these days if the State’s now treating them all like criminals?”
The optics of control
The commercial wanted to reassure viewers. But to anyone paying attention, it had the opposite effect. Instead of showing kids walking into a place of learning, they looked like inmates lining up for intake. This is what cultural conditioning looks like disguised as education.
Soft narration and smiling teachers don’t change the fact that schools are normalizing what amounts to prison culture: checkpoints, constant surveillance, and compliance rituals. It’s a lesson in obedience, the one massive takeaway students get after their parents surrender them to the State for 12-plus years.
The psychology of suspicion
Imagine being 13 years old and starting every single day proving to an authority figure that you’re not dangerous. That, in the 16 or so hours since you last stepped into the building, you’re not carrying contraband.
A daily ritual like this drills a message into kids’ heads: “You are guilty until proven innocent.”
Yet, they tell parents: “Look, we’re keeping your kids safe.” In reality, the school’s teaching kids to live under suspicion and surveillance. To Mom and Dad, it’s nothing more than safety theater.
The State doesn’t care about your child’s safety
Treating everyone like a suspect is the State’s idea of “safety.” It doesn’t empower families or strengthen communities.
Why?
Empowered families and strong, voluntary communities compete with and threaten the State’s power.
Instead, the State uses crises that you see in the news as an excuse to expand its vice grip, and parents are expected to clap like seals, bow down, submit, obey, and praise the State for “keeping their kids safe.”
The truth is ugly and uncomfortable, but obvious. Public schools aren’t just failing to educate, something the Substack newsletter Unskool hits home on. They’re training kids to accept surveillance, checkpoints, and suspicion as a normal way of life, and it’s Orwellian fiction turned real-life horror.
And when that same State celebrates your child’s conditioning in glossy commercials during a Saturday football game? That tells you how far we’ve sunk.
Dear parents who approve of this B.S.
Parents who watch those ads and nod approvingly are sheep surrendering their children to a system that doesn’t trust, respect, or treat them as individuals. They’re signing their kids up for over a decade of obedience training disguised as education.
They’d have been Nazis in the 1930s, Bolsheviks in the 1910s, and the staunchest supporters of the Kim Dynasty in the 1940s. And if they claim otherwise, they’re lying. That’s what statist apologists are phenomenal at: Lying a lot, whether it’s to you or to themselves.
Why’s that? They repeatedly fall for the propaganda they’ve been conditioned to fall for in that same public schooling system.
So let me ask again: What kind of parent in their right mind would send their kid to that? One that’s perfectly fine with turning their kid over to what’s become a glorified prison system.
If you’re tired of a culture that glorifies collective obedience over individuality, check out my Arcane Elemental Academy series, where a privatized, market-based school system negates State-imposed suspicion.
Read the first three chapters of Book I, The Arcane Prophecy, and meet our protagonist, Yote Diamondback, who’s gearing up to be in for a real, but pleasant, culture shock.
