Imagine an America in which school officials could strip-search every student in their school based on the unsubstantiated tip that one of them might have a joint. Congress is voting on a bill Tuesday or Wednesday that could make these police state tactics more common.

This is the exact stuff that our civil liberties are supposed to protect us from. I learned a long time ago that children do not have protected rights and their parents do not do much to help this. Parents allow dress codes and hair color or piercing options that kids are allowed to have in schools – usually, there is very little fight from parents while there is uproar from the student body.

Schools these days seem to support the idea of conformity – while we live in a country that celebrates diversity. Students with writing on their T-shirts are considered a distraction – isn’t that what life is a series of distractions? We are supposed to be teaching these kids how to survive in the real world – but the micro-society they live in is not like the real world.

Students are brighter than you give them credit for and earlier generations survived through much worse distractions than are afforded these students. We did graduate some bright people in the past few decades. They did not have all the intelligence of an ant.

As we get these kids to conform more and more their brains turn to jello and they lack the ability to diversify – it’s almost an Orwellian dream – and unfortunately, it seems in the future that this is where we are headed.