Wake up, Mom and Dad: your government has its paws all over your children during school hours -- always figuratively, and too often literally.  If parents are taken out of the education equation completely, something will fill the vacuum.  And that something is bound to be the police state.

When kids in Brazil, Indiana participated in a mock drug raid at Clay County Courthouse as part of the annual October Red Ribbon Awareness week, they got a lesson in what it's like to live in a police state.  The "drug awareness skit" involved the use of a drug dog and a small amount of an illegal substance planted on one of the students.  Supervising the demonstration were Superior Court Judge J. Blaine Akers, Police Chief Clint McQueen, and Officers Ray Walters and Robert Van Buren.

In one of the scenarios, a group of fifth-graders were told to lie face-down and stay still for the "police bust."  A BPD drug-sniffing K-9 began searching the students.  According to The Brazil Times, an 11-year old "juvenile" sustained deep puncture wounds to his leg when the K-9 suddenly attacked him.  The victim was first taken to St. Vincent Clay Hospital and then transported by his parents to Union Hospital for surgery.

In follow-up reports Chief McQueen said the situation was not "out of control but just a quick reaction by the dog to the young man's sudden movement."  McQueen stated that he had spoken with the mother at the hospital and that she had told him, "[I]t's OK, accidents happen."

On November 3, the dog's handler, Officer Ray Walters, submitted his report on the October 17 incident to the Clay County Commissioners.  Walters wrote that the demonstration has gone on for the last few years without a hitch.  However, Walters said he was hesitant to go along this time because Max, the K-9, was "acting up."  Walters expressed his fears to Judge Akers and other officials, but according to one report, Akers allowed the mock raid to proceed, saying that he'd done this skit numerous times and that nothing had ever happened.  Walters also wrote that he had concerns about placing the dope on the "juveniles" because "K-9's can't distinguish between real life and acting."

Judge Akers, who arranged for the K-9 units to carry out the raid on fifth-graders, has served on the bench for 13 years.  In 2012, he won re-election against his Republican opponent by citing his qualifications of "judicial experience, judicial temperament, and judicial training."  Many of his stump speeches included his success at coordinating and organizing the Red Ribbon anti-drug education campaign, where he would assemble 500 Clay County elementary-school kids annually at the courthouse.  Besides listening to judges, prosecutors, and police talk about the dangers of narcotics, the kids were routinely used as decoys for simulated K-9 narcotics searches.

From police planting drugs on innocent children at a courthouse with a superior court judge presiding to exposing kids to an aggressive drug-sniffing dog, and finally to the alleged cavalier response of the child's mother, whether premature or not, the Brazil case is chilling in its entirety.

What have the children actually learned?

• That they can be used for experimentation and exploitation for the social good and are not free to resist authorities despite the danger.

• That those sworn to uphold the law, to protect and serve the individuals in the community, can break the law with impunity in order to teach the community a lesson.

• That if the worst-case scenario happens and someone is seriously injured as a result of the experiment, and the media is notified, the authorities involved will not be held accountable.

• That the State wishes to produce compliant, passive, and pliable citizens and is using our schools as instruments of oppression to do so.

• That those acting in the parents' absence during the school day -- teachers, administrators, law enforcement, psychologists, and even judges -- have complete control over the children, with little or no interference from their primary caretakers.

(As of this writing, an investigation into the matter is still ongoing, but Judge Akers is now claiming that no drugs were planted on a student.  His denial directly contradicts statements by chief McQueen and Officer Walters.)

Getting rid of the notion that kids belong to their families is not just empty rhetoric coming from far-left socialists like Melissa Harris-Perry.  It's being acted upon in school districts all over the United States.

John Whitehead, constitutional lawyer and founder of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, in his 2012 book A Government of Wolves, paints a frightening picture of what is going on in our educational institutions across the nation.  On a daily basis, 50 million public school students from kindergarten through 12^th grade encounter surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero-tolerance policies, lockdowns, drug-sniffing dogs, and strip-searches.  Whitehead warns us that "America is on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian generation -- one populated by compliant citizens accustomed to living in a police state and who march in lockstep to the dictates of the government. In other words, the schools are teaching our young people how to be obedient subjects in a totalitarian society."

More than a hundred years before Whitehead's assessment, a progressive sociologist named Edward A. Ross published Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order.  Unlike other progressive reformers, Ross understood the potential for an educational bureaucracy run by self-appointed prestigious planners to evolve into an instrument of coercion, oppression, and indoctrination.

A state educational machine with its semi-military organization of little children, its overriding of individual bent and preference, its appeal to head instead of heart, its rational morality, its colorless and jejune textbooks, its official cult of ethical and civic principles ... is far from attractive[.]

When we note the enormous resources and high centralization of a first-class educational system; when we consider it takes forcible possession of the child for half the time during its best years, and submits the little creature to a curriculum devised more and more with reference to its own aims and less and less with reference to the wishes of the parent; when we consider that the democratic control of this formidable engine affords no guarantee that it will not be used for empire over minds--we may well be apprehensive of future developments.

Real-life examples, chosen among many out of the daily news cycle, make Ross's early-20^th-century prophecy startling in its accuracy.  The questions that emerge from these scary scenarios are, "where are the checks and balances within the school system to insure innocent children are not victimized in service to the State?" and "how have the majority of parents become so demoralized that they turn a blind eye to the dissolution of their roles as the child's primary defender?"

It was once the duty of public schools to make sure the nation's citizens were educated in reading, writing, mathematics, history, and geography.  No more.