It is September, and it is the first day of school. The children file in, ready for their lessons. First, the announcements, coming from the Central District. There will be a network ration; only a few computers may run at once. A former student was selected to join the Olympics. New statistics show the school isn't performing well on District tests. Students with IDs 960504 and 961328 are to report to the headmaster's office for questioning regarding the wearing of certain contraband apparel. The announcements are over. Now, the chant begins, each and every soul in the building holding their hands over their hards and swearing their loyalty to the Nation.
Students are encouraged to build their own schedule, with the school offering even the most advanced art and photography courses. Higher Learning Officials discourage students from taking these courses that deviate from the Central Standard, as it hurts their chances for getting into a university that will guarantee them the skills needed for entry-level positions at low pay grades, without referring them to any corporation that may be hiring; no one is hiring.
The school's math and science courses are stressed as the most important ones, so they keep on the same teachers year after year, guaranteed jobs for life. Since such teachers are in high demand and low supply, the school gives them all the leeway to teach in any way they see fit. For some, this means not teaching at all. But what is there to be done? Look for a new teacher? All of the old ones are tenured and all of the young ones had the tenured ones as teachers, so how could they be prepared for teaching these essential skills?
Grammar and literature are taught separately; those in the higher levels analyze rhetoric and literature and connect it to the human experience, while those in the lower levels read the same books as the high-level students but are told to notice the structure and flow of words, and how they convey "Jane sees the ball," but "Ball Jane the sees," would not. The higher-level students go on to become scholars, renowned in their professions and their skills as great writers and critics by other great writers and critics, while the vast majority in the lower levels take other paths, and read the works of the scholars, failing to see the craft and precision with which every work was created because it was never taught to them like it was for the future-scholars; and so this gives birth to mediocrity in the media, every famous or best-selling book being only of value when taken literally, being asked "What?" rather than "Why?"
In history class, those in the higher levels learn of the atrocities the Nation and other nations have committed in their pasts; how the great figures of the past they have always been told to regard as heroes in elementary school were thieves, cheats, bigots, murderers, genocidal maniacs spreading a mantra still engrained in societies the world over. They learn the horrifying conditions in which the poor lived then, and as they progress through the years of study, moving further through the timeline, they reach the present day and learn that nothing at all has been solved, only slightly alleviated, like radiation therapy does for cancer. But these are only for the higher-level students, the lower-levels are taught the bare bones of everything, they are not shown the horrors that come with history, the billions of dead that led to the creation of their overly-glorified Nation. Only the higher-level students are deemed worthy for this. Instead, they are shown what they've always been shown, with the addition of enemies thrown into the mix. They are told they are the ultimate Nation, the greatest one on Earth, and that it will never be eradicated, and all the problems of yesteryear have been solved because the past has nothing to do with the present; it is a separate entity. This is why nothing is solved, because those deemed well enough to learn of the blood and tears of history lobby for a change and those deemed unworthy shout back and say "But things are different, it said so in our textbook!"
This is how schooling works in this dystopian Nation. This broken, painful country in which the health of the people is not the concern of the government, freedom of speech means you are always being listened to, and the choices one makes are only socially acceptable if one is born a certain way.
God bless the United States of America.
