I attended my high school reunion this weekend. The high school has undergone some major improvements, but at the same time, I’m not so sure its the right way..

If there is anything that people can learn from the progressives, leftists, and Democrats (but I repeat myself) is that they’ve managed to get society to change in ways that favors their increasing grab on power through continual papercuts into basic freedoms and towards their end-goal of destroying cultural norms that have been the bedrock of civilization for millennia.

I went back home to celebrate my high school reunion XX years (a few decades) and was happy to see that the school is not in decline. Enrollment has grown so much in the last two decades that the school itself has undergone massive expansion. Included in that expansion is the use of more state of the art technology that allow administrators and staff to better manage the student population.

I say “manage” when I really mean “conditioning for future control.” Let me explain. While the school has embraced technology in teaching of students, it has also implemented systems in the name of “student safety.”

My hometown doesn’t really suffer from many violent incidents. Rival gangs, fringe extremists groups and anarchists don’t exist insofar as reported incidents. There are some “troublemakers” in the midst, as it is any school, but nothing has risen to the point that it requires a significant response.

Yet, the school has deployed a “safe school” system that is designed to help control, track, and monitor students during the school day. When in the classroom, attendance tracking is automatic. The class is locked down from the start of class to the end. Doors can only be opened by a school administrator or a teacher. A key can be used if there is a power loss.

In order for a student to be able to leave the class, they have an app on their device (whether personal or school provided) where they can ask the teacher for permission to leave. Once approved, the student can use the app to unlock the door to leave. The app tracks the students movements. Faculty and administrators that monitor the hall can easily pull up a list of students that have permission to be out of class.

Gone are the days of students needing some kind of excused pass that they carried around to bathroom, office, or other destination. The student’s movements are tracked via an app, recorded in a database that helps in ensuring each student is accounted for. In a school of over 2100 students inside a very large, sprawling building, technology plays a role in managing the daily routine of a student.

This is all easily accepted as an efficient process during a time when schools safety is in the national forefront, as well as an ever growing shortage of teachers and administrators within public education. This all seems great considering the circumstances of the moment. I have a very different take.

Our country was founded on the principles that ending tyranny from oppressive government was paramount to a free and thriving society. And yet, students today are being conditioned to accept big brother authoritative control of their lives.

There is a false belief that these systems are meant to keep students safe. This was mentioned a couple of times as the reason for it’s implementation in the school. From my perspective, it is a convenient, if not obvious form of conditioning: “The things we are doing are to keep you safe and provide an orderly means of control to give you the best possible education.”

If kids experiences accept that technology in the hands of authority is to keep you safe, when they get older and are faced with larger societal questions, it’s a lot easier to accept a more intrusive “government surveillance solution” when our leaders determine that a national threat exists, especially within our own society.

I had a discussion about this another classmate who was skeptical of my view until we talked through it. Fear of harm to students is what drives school districts to install and maintain these systems. Parents are given the false sense of security that the money spent will keep their kids safe, when in fact, none of these systems will stop a mass-murderer from fulfilling their sinister objective.

In reality, this has played into the hands of leftists for years. Keep fear in the masses and you can slowly indoctrinate them into doing anything for their safety. Democrats and progressives often use phrases like, “Kids should never fear going to school”, and “Every child has a fundamental right to be free from violence at school”. None of these statements are remotely true, but they make effective slogans for political fundraising while kids are still dying.

And that is the problem: They created this environment in the first place. By attacking institutions as systemically broken, either from racism, discrimination, or oppression, they gave themselves moral authority to indoctrinate children. It was only during the pandemic that parents finally saw the real agenda. The changes to how kids are educated are but a small part of the larger picture to force cultural and societal changes that radically depart from traditional norms of family, faith, and self-reliance.

But unless you are paying attention, you wont see it until its too late. While some are waking up, there are still many caught up in the brainwashing. Climate change is the next “national emergency” where the government will give itself the authority to control the population. Kids in today’s world will be more obedient because they are being conditioned right in front of us.

The rest of us know the real deal, but getting school administrators, district boards and even state legislators to see it is a lot harder. Their own views are driven from academia where they believe the conclusions from “papers” provide the best guidance when making policy decisions about safety. Some of us have seen what is happening in the academic world, and oddly enough, there isn’t enough research into whether the experiments being run on computer simulations to derive policy are, in fact, rooted in reality.

And when I say rooted in reality, I mean questioning how we got here in the first place. Progressivism has gone well past the rational and into the make-believe. Science has been turned on its head to accept feelings over research and the scientific methodology. They reject fundamental norms of fairness, character, and integrity derived from religious foundations and create new moral philosophies rooted in vague and contradictory concepts of “diversity, equity and inclusiveness.” If there was ever a confusing time for kids, it’s in today’s world of liberal activists who reject reality.

One of my classmates, who is a teacher, saw my reasoning as a conspiracy; that is, until I showed them how their smartphone was tracking them and how that information was used by the government to suppress social media accounts and even harass or arrest people posting political points of view.

They still exhibited some skepticism, but a couple of other classmates were surprised at how much of our lives were being tracked. I often tell people I refuse to install the apps for Facebook and Facebook Messenger because they are intrusive apps on the phone that read my emails, text messages, and track everything I do. My peeps are now starting their own learning, and I was heartened to receive a text message from one sharing what they found.

While I’m glad the school is using technology to improve educational outcomes, I’m worried about the long term effects of how systems are being using to affect the mindsets of our kids in very subtle ways. I’m not at all against technology to help protect the kids, or even for people to protect themselves. What I’m not a fan of is government and its entities using technology to control us, the citizens who are guaranteed freedom to live our lives without government control. And certainly, not to have government condition us, and our kids, it’s OK in the name of safety.