children during normal "business" hours.


The reality of public schools in America is that they resemble prisons, holding children captive and subjecting them to monitoring, authoritarian supervision, arbitrary rules, prescribed conformity, coerced abstinence, zero tolerance insanity, irrational fears, invasion of privacy, prison-like security, unlawful searches, mind-controlling drugs, and the police state. John Taylor Gatto, in his essay, "Some


Reflections on the Equivalencies Between Forced Schooling and Prison," noted that America’s public schools and its penal system are alike because within each environment an individual’s movements, thoughts, and associations are regarded with great suspicion and are therefore controlled. Gatto explains:


Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.


Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn't any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we've been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They're like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don't have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won't surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent – or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.


In 2009, a compelling documentary was produced that focuses on the control and containment that is the government’s compulsory school system: The War on Kids. This documentary has not received the attention it deserves, but every parent who has a child that has received a sentence of thirteen (or more) years in the compulsory schooling environment should watch this film.


Note in Part 2 where the filmmaker visually shows how so many of the public schools look exactly like prisons. Some of the footage you will see throughout the film is staggering, and some of the interviews with public school bureaucrats are remarkably creepy. Here is the website for the movie, and this is the general information presented for the film (it is shown in six parts on TagTélé).


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