School is indoctrination. I'm surprised so many of my peers don't realize it.

When I was in China (country of birth), they did national anthem like either weekly or daily. I think it was every week, they would also do a flag raising ceremony. They then did a weird ceremony where first graders did wore little red scarfs, which I as an adult looked it up and its apparantly called the Young Pioneers program where they attempt to brainwash children into their "communist" ideology. ("communist" in quotes because it wasn't even real communism). So yea I always get weirded out by these weird rituals.

Then when I immigrated to the US, they do the "pledge of allegience" and the national anthem of the US, of course, being a foreign national at the time, I didn't do the pledge, but just stood up to sort of fit in, but I remained silent. I thought these rituals, national anthem, pledge of allegience, making kids wear red scarfs, was normal, just part of every country.

Then I grew older and went online and apparantly Europeans tell me the flah of allegience wasn't considered normal.

I eventually got US citizenship derived from my mother's naturalization. I did eventually get attached to the concept of the constitution and rule of law, checks and balances (I did NOT have any attachments to the US administrations or congress btw, that's a whole differe t thing). But there was always something very uncanny about the way they teach things.

They keep saying "freedom" "freedom" all over everything they teach, and when they teach civics, teachers say that "police cannot do X if they don't have probable cause" "you have rights" "innocent until proven guilty", but we know for a fact that these things do happen, but of course, they are brushed off as "mistakes", and yet cops don't seem to get held accountable.

So again, I slowly see the same pattern all over again, different country, similar indoctrination.

And to top it all off, while the US (pre 2025) was considered "democratic", schools are anything but. Schools admin and teachers always have a lot of draconian rules and some doesn't even make sense.

Like wtf is school uniform, teaching conformity and just "obey" the rules, no questions asked? Also, you aren't allowed to wear any outerwear even if its winter and you're cold unless you purchase the school's sweaters, wtf? This is a liberal city btw. So much for freedom. Freedom to get a fucking cold.

Security cameras everywhere in school, they had fucking security patrolling inside the school, like wtf its K-12.

The fucking police the bathrooms so much. They sometimes LOCK THE FUCKING BATHROOM because "drugs". LOL FUCK YOU. I'M GONNA PISS ON THE FUCKING FLOOR. (sry for caps).

Its just, when you've seen so much shit from schools in 2 different nationalistic countries, and also have to deal with your abusive parents' bullshit, you quickly develop the pattern recognition to recognize authoritarianism.

Public school is indoctrination. (And private school would be much worse, especially religious ones). Sad that people don't recognize this.