Tiny Totalitarian States

By Crispin Sartwell

My oldest son's high school is adorned with posters featuring photographs of animals and touting qualities of character, such as "independence" and "risk." In the context of a large public school, it would be generous to assume that these posters are meant as sarcasm, a bit of self-deprecating irony aimed by the administration at themselves, who would certainly meet actual risk and independence, in themselves or their teachers or their students, with twinned incomprehension and hostility. Consider the fate of a teacher, for example, who ditched the approved curriculum, or of a student who tried to post her own counter-propaganda.

Meanwhile, my second-oldest is immersed in American history. He's reading Thomas Paine, that avatar of independence. In the hall outside the room where he's doing it is a box into which students can drop anonymous accusations against one another. The persons thus accused are removed to an isolated room and searched. This is a typical enhancement to a security environment that, as is traditional in our public schools, includes continuous surveillance, disciplinary files, various forms of exile for violators, and extremely elaborate and well-coordinated, though patently asinine, propaganda campaigns.

It is no metaphor to call the typical American public school a tiny totalitarian state.

When the communists took control of Russia, their first acts involved seizing control of the arts, the design disciplines, and the media of public information. They understood the centrality of those things in the shaping of the consciousness of their citizens/victims. More recently, in a typical flourish of scholastic power, a 15-year-old student in Brookfield , Wisconsin was suspended and threatened with expulsion for recording a rap song critical of the school's principal. From wall-posters to textbooks, software to homework assignments, all information in the typical public school is controlled, and much of it surrealistically contradicts its own situation.

In most schools, there is nothing resembling an outlet for free expression or criticism of the authorities, and such attempts as may be assayed are firmly repressed. Every media outlet, from the walls to the newspapers to the closed-circuit television to the children's conversations, is monitored and controlled in an environment wholly designed by authoritarians to enable and represent their authority.

Of course, in totalitarian states, submission to authority is always backed by the specter of force. In Goose Creek South Carolina recently, students were put on the ground by gun-wielding police officers, and the entire school searched...without results. Such scenes are less uncommon than may be supposed. Get kicked out of public school and enter a descending spiral of incarceration: the reform school, the detention center, and so on.

The justification of all this runs like so: we must keep our children safe, and provide them with a secure and regulated learning environment. Security and control were of course also Stalin's justifications, Honecker's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, Pinochet's. That's how they learned to love anonymous denunciations, collaborators, universal fear. They called this liberation. With similar hilarity, we call it education.

One difference, of course, between the average twentieth-century totalitarian state and the average American middle school is that some of the dictatorship's subjects were adults, while most of the middle school's are children. Children are not accorded full citizenship rights in America, and perhaps that is justifiable, though I don't see any point in denying them the full protection of the First Amendment in every situation, including the classroom.

But it is worth pointing out that we are rearing these small people to be citizens of a democracy, and it should make us reflect on what sort of democracy we actually have that we can't allow people to take up a place within it without many years of compulsory training in subjection, even as we tell them it's independence. Perhaps we can only free you on the condition that you've learned perfectly to submit.

Or at least to simulate your submission. The resistance, thank God, continues, but secretly. Its strategies, familiar again from the totalitarian state, are sheer passivity, or graffiti, or sabotage: concealment, smiling at the authorities while quietly making their five-year plan impossible.

The strategies of control exercised by the totalitarian state are more than sufficient justification for its destruction. If the only way the modern school can operate is by the same techniques, it too would do better not exist at all.

Crispin Sartwell''s latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" (SUNY 2003).