Schools Undermine Students' Moral Agency

There have been two national stories about North Carolina public school students this week. In one, a male student slapped a female teacher twice in the face in an attack that was captured on video and later circulated throughout social media. He faces criminal charges for the assault. In the other, a student used the phrase “illegal aliens who don’t have green cards” when seeking to clarify the vocabulary word “alien”. He was suspended and the principal is so far standing behind the suspension. Both stories paint images of our school systems that ought to disturb.

Starting with the latter, it’s alarming to think that those who go to public schools and who thereby stand on government property would face something like a suspension for speaking about something so mundane. To ask a clarifying question about illegal aliens is hardly a momentous event that merits significant attention. Yet, in modern American schools, it does. The incident will remain on the student’s record and could have consequences for his future. Immersion in an environment where one cannot speak accurately for 8 hours a day prepares a student for the life of a slave more than a free citizen.

After all, “illegal alien” has long been the correct legal term for those who are in the United States without valid immigration status. While not the most politically correct phrase of today, it is still in active use. Some people allege that they were offended by the phrase, but nobody was actually harmed in the incident. The United States Department of Justice uses the term illegal alien without malice to refer to that subset of the populace.

As a result of the leftist march through the institutions, we have reached a moment when it is somehow acceptable to have graphic sex talks with children, teach racial (DEI) initiatives that cause the kids to resent each other, and have hypersexualized drag actors enter schools to give talks, but not for a student to use legally designated phraseology to describe those who have broken American immigration laws.

Then if we look over at the assault on the teacher, the video shows that nobody rushed to the woman’s defense, and she was not comfortable defending herself. The reasons she didn’t engage the attacker are unclear and are her own. We can speculate that she may have been afraid of antagonizing her attacker or running afoul of a misguided school policy, but we do not know. What is more unsettling is the lack of reaction by others. Not so long ago, other children in the classroom would have attempted to intervene or at least sought help in such a scenario. That did not happen. In modern schools, children who intervene to defend someone who is being attacked are typically punished to the same degree as the original attacker, in a system that is clearly unjust. Again, the system is organized to teach a set of values contrary to actual morality.

What we can see is that there’s a cultural shift within our schools that has tipped the scales away from moral behavior. This is where both incidents converge. There’s no independent thought allowed, so the schools operate in an almost robotic manner, depriving everyone of their humanity. Students become mere cogs in a machine that doesn’t seem just or rational, which stifles their voices and in which only those who do not care about consequence are willing to break the rules, even when those rules are unreasonable. Thus, the most aggressive will dominate such environments.

If the formation of children so clearly seeks to prepare them for abandonment of moral agency, we should be unsurprised at the state of the society that is sustained by the graduates of that behemoth.