I grew up inside a communist education, under a party that hated religious people. Some of you have parents from Eastern Europe who will recognize what I am describing. The logic is simple and it is not even hidden. They don't want you to worship God, they want you to worship the communist party.
So if they cannot make you worship the party, the next best outcome is that you worship nothing at all. And the way you produce that in a teenager is not an argument. It is supply.
They spread degeneracy. Alcohol, drugs, whatever moves fastest through a school. Does it make sense? Alcohol is the one I can describe to you politely, so take it as the floor rather than the ceiling of what went through that classroom. By fourteen I was in a classroom where drinking was simply what everyone did, and nobody in that room understood themselves to be the target of anything. That is the part that took me years to see. A fourteen-year-old cannot tell the difference between a culture and a campaign, because both arrive as what everybody is doing.
Almost every fourteen-year-old in that classroom was drunk most weekends. Whose failure was that?
Nobody's, in that room. Not the kids, not their parents, not a generation that had gone soft. It was procurement. Somebody decided a population was easier to hold if it was numb, costed it out, and supplied the means, and it worked exactly as designed. I spent years thinking I had been a bad kid. I was a statistic inside somebody's plan, which is a worse feeling and a more useful one, because a plan has an author and a character flaw does not.