Idiocracy: Disarming Teachers' Voices and Arming Teachers with Guns

The Nightmarish Paradox: Muzzled Hearts and  Minds Forced to Pack Heat

In the blinkered, Bible-thumping badlands of the American education system, we have descended into a grotesque paradox that speaks volumes about our snarling societal psychosis. The very same pious dogmatists who incessantly bleat about moral decay while stripping teachers of any intellectual freedom to craft lesson plans are now insisting those same subordinated drones pack heat like miniature mercenaries.

With one breath, the tin-pot ayatollahs and monolithic corporate suppliers who control curricula down to the stultifying detail decree what ideas are verboten in classrooms. Books are banned, speech is chilled, and any whiff of free thought is swiftly extinguished by ayatollah-issued fatwas in the name of preserving a terrified, thought-variant strain of societal "purity."




Yet with the next breath, this cavalcade of censors insists that teachers bear the potential to commit violence by lugging guns into the same spaces where exploratory thought has been made strictly haram. The very same professionals distrusted from designing pedagogy are somehow trusted to wield lethal force against those in their charge. While their tutelages are reduced to sterile regurgitations of prescribed dogma, these classroom hierarchs must simultaneously be ready to join the death cult of unrestrained firearms worship.




How did this depraved dichotomy come to pass? How did the authority of teachers become so reviled that they are legally denuded of intellectual freedom while having the grave responsibility to shoot-to-kill placed upon them? This certainly speaks to the ulterior motives behind both phenomena.




For the forces bent on shaping malleable young minds into pliant moral robotrons, the goals are explicitly stated:ufetter any influence that could breed inquisitiveness, skepticism, or a thirst for free inquiry. Better to pre-program a generation as unthinking drones than permit the heresy of critical thinking to take root. But this topiary of allowing only regressive "virtues" to grow runs smack into the obstreperous reality that schools must also stay "safe." Cue the tough-guy Glock-flexing of those who anoint themselves as havens against all risk.




The resultant paradox reveals two preristing Americas. One espouses a suffocating climate of fear - fear of different ideas, skin colors, gender identities, cultures and modes of being. The other professes an overpowering idolatry to the smelted chalice of unimpeachable firearm worship, even when it means arming the very pedagogical class it has worked so feverishly to disempower.




We have reached a nadir where the same cadres insisting on a return to some gauzy, whitebread, neo-puritanical conformity by regulating thought also clamor for that coerced homogeneity to be maintained at finally barrel point by those they've stripped of autonomy.




If this mass deformity seems morally and logically incompatible, it's because we have altogether abandoned coherence and a true notion of safety in a nation coming to contemplate mass book burnings while cinching side-arms. Until we repudiate this compound insanity, the synaptic meltdown will remain permanent: Vacant, censored minds required to keep locked and loaded in case of any stray unfurling of intellectual deviance.