"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning."—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer's hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm's way and out of trouble.

Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a whole new level of Nanny State authoritarianism to our daily lives, locking down communities, forcing kids out of the schoolroom and into virtual classrooms, leaving vast swaths of the work force dependent on government welfare, while pushing other segments into a work-from-home model, and generally subjecting us to an increasingly obnoxious level of intrusion by the government into our private lives.

Now, after almost 18 months away from a physical classroom, students are heading back to school.

Here's what they can expect.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation's 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

-draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

-overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

-school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called "disorderly" students,

-standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,

-politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,

-and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.