The Perfect Cruelty of the Public School System

The Public School Hunger Games

By any rational measure, the United States public school system is a cruel and inhumane failure. It is an institution plagued by underfunding, overcrowding, politicization, and a poisonous culture of competition - an apt real-life analogy for the dystopian world of the Hunger Games book and film series. Just as the wretched Districts of Panem were forced to sacrifice their children as tributes to compete in the televised death matches, so too do we sacrifice the futures of millions of young people to the gladiatorial arena that is the public school system.

The parallels are manifold and disturbing. In both, resources are shamefully allocated based on geographic birthright and socioeconomic status, ensuring the odds will never be in the favor of the underprivileged. Just as the opulent Capitol gorged on entertainments derived from the suffering Districts, our billionaire-minted oligarchs profit mightily from the monetization and demonization of public education writ large. Teachers, reduced to the secular equivalents of the live tributes, are woefully underpaid and expected to perform heroic feats of mentorship while laboring under soul-crushing conditions and minatory threats of sanctions over flimsy metrics like test scores - their fates subject to the whims of school boards and corporate privatizers as capricious and self-interested as any Capitol gamemaker. And the students themselves are treated as mere resources to be stripped of individuality, competitively stratified, and annually culled from opportunity via graduation or dropout, the narrowing victor's purse being diplomas and gainful employment.

It is indeed a perverse and ultra-vile system purposely engineered to keep the masses dehumanized, demoralized, and disempowered - a rigged game where loss is systemically ensured. And we allow this monstrous machinery to continue unabated under the drapery of such puffed piety as "No Child Left Behind" or insipid cultural bromides about grit, meritocracy, and a level playing field. Our entitled ruling class, so disdainful of the unwashed peasantry, gorges itself at the trough of this debasement while erecting a circuslike mania of high-stakes testing and vapid accountability metrics - all with an audible accusation that the victims of this brutalization do not try hard enough.

Just as Katniss Everdeen eventually awoke from the somnambulant trance of the Capitol's manufactured scarcities and lies to recognize the moral cancers of Panem's caste system, we too must reject the bankrupt narrative that the public school crisis is one of teacher laziness, administrative bloat, or lack of student grit. It is something more primal and intentional - a barely-concealed subjugation of the masses wrapped in trite aphorisms of accountability and hard work. Our children and educators have had their souls turned into literal commodities, bought and sold by the same power-mad charlatans as Katniss so rightfully fought against. They are the enemy, and this barbaric system of inculcated failure must be razed before one more student tribute is maimed.