Mike Hudack

When I was in high school I couldn’t shake the feeling that part of the purpose of the institution was to prepare students for the police state that was to come later in their lives.

I went to three different high schools.  In two of them the students had absolutely no rights.  Drug sniffing dogs occasionally roamed the hallways.  Locker searches were routine, without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.  Punishment was meted out by (hopefully) benevolent dictators (“deans”) who often acted arbitrarily and, sometimes, with malice.

My sophomore year I took a class called Justice in America at Fairfield High School in Connecticut.  The class was required, and taught by Chris Parisi, who you may know because of his brief appearance on the classic American Gladiators.  Our first assignment in the class was to write an essay comparing and contrasting our school and a medium security prison.  We were hard pressed to come up with many differences, except that the students were furloughed every afternoon and for the weekend — released into the custody of their parents.

This educational environment did nothing to prepare the students for life in a democratic republic.  It was pretty good training for living in a dictatorship, though.

Contrast this with Scarsdale High School, which I briefly attended during my freshman year.  Scarsdale had an “open campus” — students were free to come and go as they liked.  The school rules were written by an elected student government, which was accountable to its constituencies (the students, the faculty and the parents).  Discipline was handled by a tribunal system in which a school staff member acted as prosecutor and an elected body of students acted as jury.

This system prepared us to live in a free society.  Unfortunately Scarsdale is the extremely rare exception, and Fairfield High School is the rule.  And I’m afraid that Middletown School District, with its RFID chips, represents the future of education in this country… and therefore the future of liberty in this country.