Several recent studies have revealed the increased number of public school and college students who are experiencing various forms of mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and others. A Wall Street Journal report claims as many as 25 percent in elite colleges are thus classified, and require accommodations for exam taking, seating preference, quiet private rooms, and comfort animals. Steve Schlozman and Eliza Abdu-Glass, authors of The College Mental Health Crisis: Focus on Suicide, disclosed the thousands of suicides on college campuses each year, about two to three every day. Their emphasis is on students’ inadequate counseling, but we should ask why this generation, specifically, is so unstable and why the obvious signs have been ignored.

Is it possible to identify what could be so threatening?

Our educational system was restructured according to a radical, global, political ideology (Agenda 21) promoted by President Obama’s White House, Bill and Melinda Gates, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Governors Association, and other supporters of a federal takeover of education for a Global Economy. Called the Common Core Standards, it was implemented by 46 states and D.C. While we were deluged with Hillary Clinton’s oft-uttered phrase, “no child left behind,” David Coleman, the architect of the controversial, experimental (experimenting on our children!) curriculum, was executing an equal-outcome system, thereby eliminating the motivation and ambition of equal opportunity for individual excellence and achievement, each to his/her own interests and abilities. And, since all schools – public, private, parochial, home schools – were subject to the same textbooks and tests, and the governors handsomely rewarded, the Standards were assumed almost nationwide.

Result: the students have become guinea pigs to a seemingly untested Standard – with a specific purpose.

Flawed textbooks frustrate students

Seriously flawed mathematics and science standards, put into practice by mathematically- and scientifically-illiterate state boards of education, are frustrating, limiting, and damaging to the children who experience distress despite their efforts. Creative classic literature has been replaced by depressing, sexualized dystopian novels that oppress the spirit and exceed the children’s maturity level. Maria Calamia, licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, reported 200 to 300 percent more children experiencing serious stress and trauma due to the new curricula, citing numerous incidents of the better students’ crying, bedwetting, self-mutilating, and experiencing nightmares at their new mediocrity.

Non-fiction, informational texts and historical documents of a leftist agenda were also introduced, guaranteed to not only indoctrinate, but also to increase boredom and lessen interest and reading ability, with one report showing that 700,000 graduates per year cannot read their own diplomas. In 2016, more than 40 percent of four-year-college students (two million) did not earn their degree and dropped out; and only 26 percent of two-year students will earn their degree.

Result: frustrations, inabilities, inadequacies, distress, youthful hopes dashed; a generation betrayed, unable to cope and function independently in society.

Isolating students from close friendships

Parents were powerless to defy the system as they saw their children dealing with lessons of sexual deviancy that inspire change to their very natures, secular progressivism and Islamic indoctrination, and diminished coverage of Judeo-Christian values, American and European history. Having already been deprived of best friends, a buddy, a confidant, the troubled students are in the untenable position of being isolated at the same time that they are being molded to conform to a group-think mentality.

Result: psychological disconnectedness and susceptibility to neuroses.

Academia’s adoption of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States provides a leftist focus on the exploitation of the majority by the “elite white population.” White privilege has become the accusation du jour, creating a dangerous intolerance for whites, America’s foundational documents and principles. Several private schools nationwide have begun segregating their white students, encoding them to believe they have unfairly benefited from their whiteness at the expense of other races; students of color are receiving praise and rewards, not for excellence, but for their skin. Harvard is now being sued by Students for Fair Admissions for its nonacceptance of qualified Asians and white males, the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping used to disqualify Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, white teachers are being challenged about their own cultural competence.

Result: divisiveness, a pervading but undefinable burden of guilt leading to the losses of pride, belief system, and self-assurance.

Intersectionality: politics of strife

The comparatively new concept, called “Intersectionality,” has been introduced. A student may claim victimhood, anger, blame, and failure on the basis of skin color, gender, religion, country of origin, heritage, and any combination or number thereof for more status. Academia and the Left have now bestowed on every race, religion, heritage, and sexual orientation the psychological reasons for injury to their self-esteem, to stir hatred toward others or inwardly toward themselves. Whites have been classified as the enemy to the degree that white students are riddled with guilt and white educators are being singled out as “troublesome” and unqualified to teach students of another color.

Result: inadequacies on several levels, conflict and confusion from the clash between reality and new indoctrination.

If that were not enough, where parents rebelled against the schools, the schools may now institute Jeb Bush’s new kind of depersonalized training, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, that keeps the students at their computers, sans accommodations for higher or lower achievers or interaction with teachers and peers. Conversation, analysis and discussion are deterred, leading to group-think and loss of emotional ties, and the graduates earn watered-down degrees with little labor-market value.

Result: loneliness, joblessness, idleness, depression.

With best friendships discouraged and sexual differences devalued, textbooks teach that promiscuity is acceptable, that biological sex is meaningless and fluid, and that sex change is plausible.

Result: loss of identity from gender destruction.

The proverbial floor is being pulled out from under these children who are experiencing increased seclusion, fears and anxieties, without a friend or parental support system. The young and vulnerable are defenseless against the multi-pronged attacks issued by their teachers and professors. So, can anyone wonder that the suicide rate has increased, doubled for boys and tripled for girls?

Result: escape by self-destruction.

Now ask yourself, “Why?”