day no. 16,899: every school a prison, every prison a school

“It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form that every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their servile principle in the case of the schools. Everyone goes to the Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there. I prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.” — G.K. Chesterton, A Utopia of Usurers

Government schools are concentration camps for kids minus the concentration. They want a high concentration of minds behind their barricades with little to no concentration of those minds once they get there. Schools no longer provide the tools of liberty — the original meaning and import of the liberal arts. Instead, the shackles of slavery are clapped onto empty heads to prevent them from developing any kind of acumen or craft competence for the fervor of freemen.

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?"  — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape Proposes a Toast

Democracies do not want great men and the government schools produce excellent results with respect to their objectives by eliminating excellency in the populace by nipping it in the bud.