Children of Hamelin: The End of the Story

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;

Alexander Maistrovoy ——Bio and Archives--February 14, 2026

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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 determines the future of states and entire civilizations? The most profound, and at the same time simplest, answer was given by Samuel Smiles, a mid-19th-century British philosopher.

He wrote: “The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men”.

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.

The Founding Fathers of liberal democracy believed in an educational system capable of fully unfolding human potential. In the vision of Locke, John Stuart Mill, Madison, and Franklin, Western values were based, first, on the foundation of national culture; second, on humanistic ideals; third, on the principles of morality laid down by the Jewish prophets and Christian thinkers; and finally, on the concepts of rationalism.

In contemporary postmodern society, all four of these pillars have been totally destroyed. National traditions are erased from collective memory and remain only as historical relics in museums, empty churches, and monuments of medieval Gothic architecture. The humanistic ideal of a person striving for self-improvement, praised by Socrates and Epictetus and the Italian humanists, has been castrated and crucified (“Dead White European Males”, isn’t that so?).

The religious-ethical code begun by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah was denigrated and rejected. Finally, the rationalism of the 18th–19th centuries was declared dead after the disasters of the 20th century and replaced by irrationalism as an independent approach free from any restrictions

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”.

In 2023 Daily Mail wrote: “One in five young Americans have a positive view of Osama Bin Laden” and “three in 10 believe the views of the terrorist leader who slaughtered thousands of innocent people were a ‘force for good’”.

“Another DailyMail.com poll in October found one in 10 voters under the age of 30 had a positive view of Hamas, despite the group's murderous attack on Israel that killed more than 1,300 men, women and children”.

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

According to the Oregon Department of Education, maths is racist …”because it requires a correct answer”: “white supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions”. 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. Canada burned books allegedly containing content offensive to the indigenous peoples (ashes from the burned books were used as fertilizer for a tree). Oxford University offered to use the gender-neutral pronoun 'ze' instead of 'he and she'. Toronto District School Board drop terms 'men,' 'women,' 'boys,' and 'girls' in reproductive health learning........

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