I will never forget my first published piece. It was a letter to the editor of the Ligonier Echo, the weekly newspaper of the small town wherein I grew up. I was all of 10 years old at the time, but that didn’t keep me from reaching great peaks of moral indignation. I thundered from my mountain top. I vituperated. I fumed and steamed. My crusade was not unlike Greta’s, nor was the source of my rage so different. In my case it was Miss Maile. She was my 5th grade teacher at the toney private school I attended on a scholarship. She was not the warmest teacher in the world, but she was interesting. And committed. To turning us all into hard leftists just like her. We learned socialism in her classroom through Man: A Course of Study, a curriculum infamous for its political bias. We learned environmentalism as she read to us Watership Down.
We learned journalistic activism as she encouraged the whole class to write letters to the editor opposing a proposed nuclear power plant in our back yard, the Donegal Energy Park. It was, in fact, a class wide project. She, in short, used us, our innocence and our ignorance to score points in a political battle. All this more than forty years ago.
Miss Maile, like Greta’s teachers, understood that education is discipleship. There is no set of morally neutral facts that we can safely ask the state to instruct our children in. Because every education will ever and always induct its students into a worldview. That’s the very goal of education- instilling our deepest convictions in those under our charge. Heck, I’m doing it right now. I’m trying to help you, to instruct you, to inform you that Greta isn’t an anomaly, a glitch in the system. She’s not even a feature of the system. She is the platonic ideal of their goal. She is their omega. She is their success, not because she thinks for herself, not because she is articulate. Not even because she is passionate. She is their success precisely because she doesn’t think for herself, precisely because she spews forth their message, precisely because she has no passion of her own, just their fevered passions.
Greta, in short, is a puppet, Pinocchio telling lies for our entertainment. She is dancing on the stage set up for her at Vanity Fair. Our job isn’t, because we do not share her views, to be aghast and appalled at her views. Our job is not to look down our noses at her. Our job instead is to feel sorry for her, and her parents, and more important still, to look to our own children, to see how much they are being shaped by the cookie cutters on the factory floor. This is not a time to score political points by laughing at the show. It’s time to check our children for strings, and, if we find them, to cut them off mercilessly.
