The moral philosophy of the high school student is "get grades that are good enough to graduate and/or get accepted into your 'safety school'". If objecting to or evading surveillance, or using a non-clear backpack, risks suspension or expulsion, it is therefore a moral imperative to use a clear backpack and submit to panopticon surveillance.

It is only later, after graduation, that the experience of being treated like criminal suspects at all times is applied to their developing worldview. And their conclusion will be "the elder generations are all paranoid assholes". They won't be wrong.

I get the sense that the backlash will probably take the form of "You want to strip away my privacy and pry into my personal life? Fine. I will push so much of my personal information onto you that you will recoil in absolute cringe at my oversharing. Here are pictures of me doing all the things you find abhorrent, like having nontraditional gender and sexuality, or voting for a democratic socialist."

The phony compassion delivered by public schooling taught me to be nihilistic. I think that's what the parent poster was getting at. It wasn't a strict adherence to some system I once got a lecture about (because I didn't get one either), but as a natural response to the platitudes they taught.

I could shake off that "wrong" way of thinking because I was under the impression it was abnormal and needed to blend in with the crowd. So in retrospect from writing this post... I guess what they really taught me was doublethink.

You probably also define religion pretty broadly I suspect.

I could tell you that there is joy in life, beauty in the planet, happiness in relationships with our fellow humans and this is reason to live — spread love. Is that philosophy, religion (optimism?)?

The best "teachers" in my life have taught me, if nothing else, the joy of learning itself. There's no nihilism in that.

When nothing you do matters, everything you choose to do anyway is art. So try not to make ugly art.

Is that a quote from someone else? I love it and want to properly attribute it when sharing.

I don’t understand how this is a response to my post, rather than that thing where people put their hand up to ask a question and then just state their position instead.