Honor Student

hon-or stu-dent n, obs] one who successfully resists an educational system's effort to eradicate independent thought; SEE TROUBLEMAKER, REBEL, UNPERSON, OUTLAW

2020 will not be remembered as the year American public education achieved its true goal - the creation of a citizenry unable to think or live independently - but it should be. While well-intentioned theorists have for decades been recommending policy and ballot-box solutions to political threats, America's public-school progeny were quietly being trained in the background to render such bandages irrelevant.

Political systems are a product of prevailing philosophy, which is a product of individual thinking, which is a product of how individuals have been taught to think. Political officialdom results from the education that made it possible and no power on earth - no patriotic slogan, no congressional bill or executive order, no "most important ever" election - can alter that truth.

Education is the wellspring from which a nation ascends - or the quagmire into which it sinks.

Through the lens of fiction Honor Student proposed in 1989 that America's future could be salvaged from within its educational system by students whose not-yet-subservient minds still functioned autonomously. Today, at so late a stage in freedom's decline, salvation from within is likely America's - and therefore the world's - sole remaining alternative to a totalitarian Second Dark Age.