In his novel, “1984,” George Orwell tells readers about Winston Smith’s neighbors, the Parsons, who not only are enthusiastically obedient servants of the all-powerful collectivist state themselves, they also have two children who have, with great excitement, joined the “Junior Spies.”
Spoiler: The kids turn in their folks for arrest and torture, because, of course, they had transgressed one of the myriad, ever-changing, ever-increasing government edicts.
Pardon anyone who might be confused, because Orwell's novel takes place in a dystopian future England. But it sure sounds like the mindset the government-power-wielding school bureaucrats in hardcore left-wing Wellesley, Massachusetts, are pushing.
Harriet Alexander reports for The Daily Mail:
A Massachusetts public school system is encouraging students, parents and staff members to report each other for incidents of 'bias' and 'microaggressions'…
And what, you might ask, comprises a “microaggression?”
She continues.
…such as saying the principal is 'crazy', mispronouncing names and scheduling tests on 'cultural holidays'.
Oh, yes. How dare anyone criticize the tax-consuming principal of a school or mispronounce a name, be the culprit a student or another school employee? All must conform. Big Brother demands it.
The district introduced a policy on 'Responding to Incidents of Bias or Discrimination', with an accompanying Google Doc for those connected to the school to anonymously report each other.
The policy was created in 2019, but only recently discovered.
A series of slides designed to explain the policy were obtained by Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that fights against indoctrination in American classrooms and activist-driven agendas in schools.
What the nonprofit found is designed to be read by teachers and school staff in Wellesley, but it also applies to student behavior, since, of course, the pressure-cooker of government-run indoctrination camps isn’t pressing enough on the minds of kids who are trapped in the system.
Nicole Neily, president and founder of the group, said the program served to silence debate and discussion… 'Once made aware of these programs' existence, most rational students simply refrain from discussing potentially controversial topics altogether out of an abundance of caution; as a result, whole lines of discussion and arguments that might be found on a nightly news show quietly and conveniently disappear from college campuses,' she wrote, in an op ed in Real Clear Education, published on Monday (June 14).
And Neily made another excellent point.
’Bias response teams send a clear message not only that certain opinions are wrong but that the correct coping method, when confronted with such a situation, is to 'go tell the grownups.'
And that is not only the nature of top-down, follow-the-leader, go-along-to-get-along politically hierarchical thinking, not only the tendency of leftists to push people to “appeal to authority,” it has been the collectivist plan for over a century to indoctrinate children into this mindset as if they are animals, sheep, under the control of their shepherd, who will “nurture” this statist tendency into adulthood.
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It is precisely the policy Lenin’s NKVD/Cheka employed almost immediately following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, circa October, 1917, and it was what the German Nazis soon adopted from the Soviets to form the Gestapo, a program that continued, under the name Ministry for State Security (Stasi), when the Soviets took over East Germany. It also is the template described by Orwell in "1984."
And guess what? Today, in America, it’s not isolated to Wellesley, Mass, schools.
Writes Alexander:
In Maryland and in Massachusetts, the Montgomery County Public Schools and Newton Public Schools are in the process of introducing similar anonymous reporting systems for 'bias offenses'.
So, perhaps it would be beneficial to tell those tax-funded folks about the path they follow. Laura Williams spelled it out in an excellent piece on the German Secret Police, published in November, 2019, by the Foundation for Economic Education:
In that kind of tattle culture, reporting your neighbors for minor wrongdoing might keep your own family safe. The secret police had so much personal information about each citizen and so much influence over institutions (whether you could get into college, get a job, buy a car) their power was almost absolute—and absolutely unaccountable. They didn’t have to arrest you—they could socially paralyze you.
Of course, they did arrest people, many, many people, and that practice expanded the social paralysis.
In the U.S., the paralysis has been spreading for years, and the machinery of punishment via the tax-fed state has been growing.
Public schools won’t stop it, because they are designed to stifle freedom and dissent through the seizure of tax money and the collectivist nature of their policy-making.
The only way to stop the growth of the problem is to address the heart of the problem: government-run education.
Escaping the system leads to freer minds and freer speech.
With revelations such as this one from Wellesley, perhaps more people will choose liberty over being servile, speech-policed sheep.