Special to WorldTribune.com

By Alexander Maistrovoy, February 21, 2026

And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast.

— The Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child’s Story

What makes an average individual a law-abiding, sensible, responsible citizen — loyal to their country and ready for civilized dialogue?

The answer is simple: Education.

What do we see today?

• Nearly half of 18-24-year-old Britons (45%) don’t know that Nelson led the British to Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar; 34% were unaware that Charles Darwin was English.
• Half of all Germans do not know the exact date when Berlin was divided.
• Half of German teenagers do not know that Adolf Hitler was a dictator, and only a third were certain that the East German government toppled in 1989 was totalitarian. “This is shocking. These are students that have almost no political knowledge at all,” said Klaus Schroeder of the Free University in Berlin, one of the authors of the study.
• In USA almost 20% of 1,200 American teens could not identify the American enemy in World War II, and more than 25% mistakenly believed that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Half did not know whom Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated. “It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial,” said Lynne Munson, Common Core’s executive director.
• 83% of U.S. Adults polled failed a basic test on the American Revolution.
• Over half mistakenly attributed the Karl Marx quote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington or Barack Obama. More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place;
• The incredible ignorance of the youth was revealed during the war between Israel and the Hamas Islamists after the massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. Thousands of students took to the streets with slogans such as “Free Palestine from the river to the sea”. Ron E. Hassner, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the following: “From Which River to Which Sea?”: “Only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic”. 75% could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map. 25% “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea”.

Ignorance Displaced by Ideology

Ugly quasi-Marxist theories have crippled the education system. Education ministries, departments of education, schools and teachers preach madness.

According to Oregon Department of Education, math is racist …”because it requires a correct answer”: “white supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions”.

Related: Math is racist according to Seattle Public Schools, October 22, 2019

UK textbook offered children “to ask questions to terrorists” to understand them better.

Buffalo schools and even kindergartners taught that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism.

Toronto District School Board drop terms ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘boys,’ and ‘girls’ in reproductive health learning material, used instead of them the terms ‘people with a uterus,’ ‘people with a penis,’ ‘people who have more testosterone,’ and ‘people who have more estrogen’.

Children’s books are ruthlessly censored or destroyed altogether.

The movie Gone with the Wind removed from HBO Max because of its “racist depictions”.

In 2017 Sweden’s libraries rewrote again Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren in 1948, because of “racist” expressions.

For the same reason, works such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom and Jerry cartoons, classic Disney films, such as Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp, and Jungle Book, were censored or removed from teaching.

Schools in UK and the United States routinely allow students to change genders without telling their parents, and create ‘secret gender transition closets’.

Students at woke schools have been identifying as neogender “furries” — like horses, dinosaurs and even curse-casting moons. Teachers are afraid to speak out against this phenomenon.

The New York Board of Regents banned all uses of images and names for school mascots related to indigenous people as part of the fight against “systemic racism”. In Germany, they teach anti-white Critical Race Theory. In the United States, books like “Not My Idea” are promoted in classrooms, explaining to readers that “whiteness” is what drives white people to make “deals with the devil” for “stolen land, stolen riches and special favors.”

In Cupertino, California, third grade students were required to rank themselves on a scale of “power and privilege” based on their race. According to education state department in Arizona and Islington Council’s (London) early years department, infants begin to show signs of racism …as early as three months old. A leading London private school overhauled its English curriculum to challenge “white-centric, patriarchal and cis-gender ideologies”. The students here discuss “Macbeth’s toxic masculinity” and read Shakespeare’s The Tempest “through the lens of colonialism”.

At Catholic (!) Elementary School in Brampton, Ontario, within the framework of “cancel culture” Mother’s and Father’s Day were replaced by Family Appreciation Day. Irish textbooks say Jesus was from ‘Palestine’ (Jesus lived in Judea), and Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz was a “prisoner of war camp” only. Ottawa school board’s gender consultant called Jesus a “radical activist, …a drag queen, and also not white”; British teachers are encouraged to teach that Vikings were “not all white” and some were Muslim.

Is it even worth continuing?

The aggressive ignorance prevailing in the humanities not only deprives people of truthful information but destroys the moral and spiritual equilibrium of the average person.

Belief in Alternate, Godless Realities . . .

People don’t believe in God. But it’s necessary to believe in something, so they believe in flying saucers, ghosts, stars, magic, and witchcraft. Exactly according to G.K. Chesterton’s idea: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything”.

• The number of ‘witches’ and Americans practicing Wicca religious rituals increased dramatically and achieved 1.5 million in U.S. in 2018. In 1990, they estimated about 8000 Wiccans in this country.
• Insane conspiracy theories, as well as Satanism are gaining an unparalleled popularity. Satanic sect “grown over the last six years into an international movement that boasts more than 100,000 members, with 18 official chapters in the U.S. …”.
• The Zombie Apocalypse is discussed in reputable publications with unprecedented seriousness.

One could expect that at least the Academy would remain a bastion of Reason and enforce knowledge but, alas, the opposite occurs. We see modern inquisitors on pulpits who are ready to burn “heretics” at the stake – whether they are opponents of gender madness or those who are skeptical about global warming. What values do teachers and professors communicate to young people?

Not rationality, logic, and knowledge, but their crippled conscience and intellectual anomalies determine their thoughts and actions.

9/11 gave us the best examples of such irrational hatred. Famous professors proudly declared that:

• “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote”;
• “The United States had it coming”;
• The ruins at Ground Zero “more beautiful than the buildings were”;

. . . Leading to Psychosis

We observe the triumph of quasi-religious madness, surpassing in its perversion the fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the obsession with class struggle among the Communists. Psychosis has affected all areas of scientific activity.

• Students of London University demanded to remove Plato, Descartes and Kant from their syllabus simply because they were white, and replace them with philosophers from Africa and Asia;
• Students at the University of Pennsylvania replaced the picture of Shakespeare with the picture of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, self-described “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet”;
• After Trump’s wins in 2016 and 2024 students were crying, teachers canceled lectures, universities offered students milk, cookies, puzzles, Legos, and ‘destress sessions’. Harvard’s law school, meanwhile, put tissue boxes in every classroom;
• Universities exclude white and Asian students under DEI programs on “race-based preferences”;
• “Straight white men” feel alienated in the higher education workplace.

Paranoid professors are obsessed with the cult of Critical Race Theory that permeates the entire Academy and all areas of knowledge.

• One of them wished “White Genocide for Christmas”;
• Second one said about white people: “we got to take these motherf*****s out”;
• Third (iconic figure of America Prof. Ibram Xolani Kendi): “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity”;
• At the event in Berea College (Kentucky) ‘white citizenship’ and ‘Trumpism’ were described as terrorism;

Paranoia surrounding ‘dying Mother Earth’ turns scientists into crazed monsters.

• They suggested cannibalism to solve the problem of global warming and to grow steak using human cells and blood;
• They forced students to pray to ‘the ancestors’ and ‘Mama Earth’ and referred to modern medicine as ‘white science’;
• University of Helsinki gave climate activist Greta Thunberg, a girl who struggled to complete high school education with Asperger syndrome … a honorary doctorate in theology.

Hatred of Israel, a tiny country surrounded by Islamist regimes and brutal tyrannies, subjugated Academia.

• One of them called Hamas’ massacre in Israel on October 7 ‘exhilarating’;
• The other (a transgender man who identifies as a woman and Jew), said she “supports the killing of any Israeli or Zionist colonialist”;
• 80 CUNY professors signed petition saying Hamas atrocities are legit ‘Military Operation’; professors at Northwestern University described Hamas as a ‘political group’;

The Academy has lost its intellect, as well as conscience and humanity, not to mention scientific and critical thinking.

Modern political theories have created surreal constellations worthy of Kafka’s pen.

• Academic departments, university trade unions, and student organisations declared that “Free Palestine is only possible through Queer, Racial, Gender, Reproductive, and Environmental Justice”, that supporting Palestine is a “feminist issue” and “Trans liberation can’t happen without Palestinian liberation”;
• An Associate Professor of Research Methods and Human Development and Family Science asserted that even the institution of marriage promotes ‘white supremacy’;
• Princeton launched a “new ‘Drag University’ program” for preparation of future drag queens, while The University of British Columbia advertised a summer camp for “queer, trans, Two-Spirit, questioning, and allied (2S/LGBTQ+) youth from across B.C. and Yukon” on remote island to be “free from colonial notions such as the nuclear family”;

I could go on and on…

Subsidized in Part by Qatar

The situation at the Academy is aggravated by the enormous influence of countries whose totalitarian ideology is incompatible with democratic values. Qatar, a tiny Middle Eastern emirate that sponsors all Islamist movements including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Taliban and Al Qaida, between 2007 and 2024, gave more than $5.6 billion to 61 American schools, including Ivy Leagues. Or was that $20 billion? Or perhaps even $100 billion? Who knows?

The Qatari government is funding teacher salaries, curriculums in American schools via Qatar Foundation International (QFI) to advance Qatari influence.

The End: Cultural Totalitarianism

Ignorance, moral corruption, pathological universalist concepts, and dubious external influences have poisoned the well of Western thought. The cultural totalitarianism turned people into sterile zombies, brainwashed them, perverted the minds of men and women, and subdued intellectuals responsible for the future of their people.

There is no longer any strength or desire for the training of mind and body that Locke called for — only fatigue, emptiness and doom, hidden by cheap shows and fleeting pleasures.

Born in Moscow, Alexander Maistrovoy is a journalist based in Israel and the author of “Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger)”, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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