By Nathan Barton

In Sweden, according to the Daily Mail, a new apocalyptic cult has taken over public schools, promoting groupthink and bullying.  It is very reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 in many ways, with its Daily Hate and regimented life. One bullied student, refusing to go along with the rest of her class, has made international news.

You may have heard of Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old Swedish prophet of global warning catastrophe, kind of a junior version of New York’s beloved Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is described by the Mail:

Greta Thunberg is a climate activist with Asperger syndrome who rose to international fame for her weekly ‘school strikes’ outside of the Swedish parliament house. Hundreds of thousands of students in over a hundred countries across the globe have followed the young girl’s example.

This teenager’s followers in a Swedish public (government-run, tax-funded) school derided the “climate denier” for refusing to participate in their school strike. This is very similar to the sort of cultism we find in middle and high school students right here in the Fifty States.  And a mild version of what we find on college campuses today.  It is not just global warming (aka climate change) that triggers such fanaticism in the schools.

We see the same groupthink and forced participation when it comes to promoting socialism, fighting fascism, demanding gun control, fighting racism, combating sexism, demanding abortion, pushing for trans-sexual rights, and more.  “Progressive” causes all.

The students do more than just conduct strikes that have nothing at all to do with legitimate grievances about living or working conditions in the schools, or even about the school curriculum or abusive teachers.  In addition to the protests and strikes, they attack (sometimes physically) students, teachers or professors, and guest speakers who do not slavishly agree with their current cause. They use these things to make demands of the community, their society, or their governments.  Or even other societies and governments.

And it is not just the students.  The situation in Sweden was triggered and made worse by the behavior of the bullied student’s teacher, and defended by the school administrator. What we find is that the school faculty and administration – at least as a whole – actually support and encourage the strikes, the protests, and the attacks.  Even against their own members and their own institution.

Stateside, the Evergreen State University in Washington State is a well-known example of how education at any level is damaged and even thwarted.  The priority is not teaching but activism; turning students into mobs that turn on their fellows and seek to pull down not just their fellow students, not just their institutions, but society.  And especially liberty and the rule of law.

Why is this happening? Clearly, the three-generation-long effort on the part of the radical statists (the national, international, and transnational socialists, in particular) – the so-called leftists – to fully control the Fifty States’ education system is bearing fruit.  Ripe and indeed overripe. The statists, whatever they call themselves, dominate the education system completely.  Not just the public schools (those that are government-run, tax-funded), but the private schools as well.

How did they do this? By working through government.  As far as I know, there are only one or two private colleges or universities which do not accept (directly or indirectly) government funds. Federal, state, local, tribal. (One of those is Hillsdale, or so it claims. College of the Ozarks may be another.) They accept government funds by way of student loans and grants and scholarships, and directly through research grants and food programs and other education financing.  And with the money comes the strings. Lots of them: Title IX and and every other sort of rule and regulation to prohibit any form of discrimination – both of students and staff.  Every sort of restriction on what can (or even must) be taught.

Another way is the “academic community” – the “scholars” that consider themselves the elite of both nation and planet. The academic community has always been “progressive” and “liberal” and “skeptics” and in search of power, directly and indirectly. Both in public PS-12 education and the university system as developed in Europe in the Middle Ages. This means that each generation of faculty is a bit more (or a lot more) “liberal” (and “liberated”) than the last.  Those who do not play the game by the rules are blacklisted, and never rise in the hierarchy.  It is much like we find in the Roman Catholic (and other) Churches. Each generation builds on the power and the “accomplishments” of the last.

For that matter, it is much like government itself: power builds on power.

And in turn, the succeeding generations of graduates are more and more molded into what the faculties and educrats want. Each decade, the student bodies are pushed more in the direction of radicalism, activism, and – inevitably – poorer and poorer education, because real learning is increasingly pushed aside.

Until something happens.  A revolution, or an invasion and conquest, or a collapse.  Not just of the education system, or of the government, but of society.

It seems that we must be nearing that point now, not just in the Fifty States or in the West (Europe, the Commonwealth, and North America, in particular). At a time when we need more and better educated people, the schools are producing people who are increasingly unable to reason, to learn and practice technical skills, and to discipline themselves.  Our technology and opportunities are better than at any other time in human history. But it seems as though the fraction of people able to seize those opportunities is shrinking.

Thanks in large part to schools.