A 12-year old boy, a straight-A student, is flagged as "potentially dangerous" because he defended the 2nd amendment and the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

A computer program called Mosaic 2000 is developed to identify "violence-prone" youth, its questions betraying a particular political bias against gun ownership.

Kindergartners are suspended for playing cops and robbers, because their use of their fingers as "guns" and those "guns" accompanying sound effects ("bang! bang!") violated a school policy against "threats".

Five million school age kids are now on mind-altering drugs, and those drugs continue to be administered at younger and younger ages.

What do these facts have in common? They all represent a systematized effort within our educational system to threaten, scare, and drug any trace of individuality and political-incorrectness out of young people. But how could the educational establishment, the people whose aim is supposedly to help provide a quality education for youth -- so that they can function as independent individuals when they reach adulthood -- do such a thing?

To understand, we must take a look at the nature of the system.

Compulsory education forces young people to be in some sort of state-approved schooling environment. Onerous taxes reduce educational choice by stealing away precious money from working families, virtually forcing them to send their kids to a public school. In the public school system, these young people -- initially so curious about the world around them -- have it drilled into their heads that there is only one approach accepted in public education: the obey-the-teacher, top-down, from the textbook, authoritarian model -- not exactly congruent with the development of independent thought. And so the teacher reads from his or her textbook, and the students obediently complete the work they're told to do, the substance of which they will forget after the next test (if not sooner).

The system "educates", producing indoctrinated automatons incapable of independent thought, and the teachers get paid. Any "hyperactive" (read: independent-minded) kids are immediately put on Ritalin or Prozac or some other fun mind-altering drug (so much for that Drug War, eh?); stuck in this so-called "educational environment", they try desperately to hang on until they are 18 and thus considered old enough to make their own decisions (as if they could possibly do any worse than what's being done to them as it is!)

And when the occasional kid does snap and decides to bring a semi-automatic pistol to school to pay back that guy who gave him a dirty look the other day, the media and its "experts" cry "Why?" and scratch their heads in wonderment. Ignoring the authoritarian educational system, with its crusade against independent thought, ignoring the mind-altering drugs, the media finds its answer: "Eureka!", they yell, "It's the Guns!"

"Of course!"  "Why didn't I think of that?!"

Back in the real world, where inanimate objects don't whisper "kill that guy" in the ears of their owners, we see a system designed to produce dumbed-down, malleable kids -- easy for teachers to control and even easier for politicians to manipulate come election time. And given these ends, everything seems to be going pretty well for the system, except for one thing.

There are those who don't back down, who won't be drugged, threatened, intimidated, or brow-beaten into compliance with the system. And when these brave individuals who are some of the best among us -- those young people who are truly our freedom-loving-comrades-in-spirit -- confront their oppressors by pointing out their lies and questioning their authority, the teachers and establishment's boot-licking "experts" are shocked, shocked that a mere youth would dare question them. And hell hath no fury like an authoritarian pissed at a subject under their jurisdiction (see Stalin, Hitler, etc., for historical examples).

So it is for those individuals who have courage enough to stand up to tyranny and oppression in our schools for whom the system's worst fury is reserved. By virtue of their already proven courage and tenacity, these individuals are likely the visionaries and innovators of the future that the school system is supposed to prepare, not harass -- and that is ironic, indeed. But we're all pretty familiar with government programs generating the exact opposite of their intended results, now aren't we?

If we truly want to see a free society, then we must focus on liberating youth from the shackles of oppression that exist in the present educational system. The shackles are no longer merely those of lies, deceptions, and propaganda, for those can be defeated with truth, reason, and logic.  (I know this for a fact; I used to be a left-liberal myself!)  But with the use of this grab-bag of psychoactive drugs thrown at every youth perceived as "rebellious" or "troublesome", young minds are now being enslaved at the neuro-chemical level; the importance and potential implications of this fact simply cannot be overstated. American society is raising a generation of drug-dependent dolts who will gladly welcome rule from government Controllers, and -- with Ritalin as their soma -- herald the ushering in of a socialist America.

Just to clarify, I'm not some doom-and-gloomer saying that such horrible things will inevitably happen. Nothing is truly inevitable within the course of human affairs; we are beings of free will, after all. However, we'd do well to remember that truth cuts both ways: while the frightening scenario I've described isn't inevitable, it will likely happen if we don't take action against it. The onus is on us.

I said before that those courageous youth who don't buckle down before the system are the first monkey-wrench in the statist educational machine. We must be the second. We must fight to destroy mandated mind-altering drug regimens. We must fight against oppression of non-mainstream opinions within the educational environment. And, most importantly of all, we must band together and relegate the source of the problem -- government-mandated compulsory enslavement for twelve years -- to the dustheap of history.