When they go to school, they sit in prison-like "educational institutions" under fluorescent lights and forced to stay inside listening to shitty people (most teachers I think are pretty shitty people) drone on about shit the kids do not see the value of, for the purpose of performing on standardized tests that set the trajectory of their lives.
I would never do this to my high school students. If I'm not getting fistbumps and smiles all day, then there's something horribly wrong.
A few months ago, I saw a video of high school students from the 1990s trending on TikTok. That was a type of educational environment I recognized. Before George Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act" so-called "reforms" (and certainly before Barack Obama's "Common Core" reforms). Before everyone had cell phones. When TVs were were rolled into classrooms on carts, social media was unheard of and people looked at one another as opposed to screens in front of them.
Granted, I am not anti-tech in school. We did not have a computer science program when I was in grade school, but I think it's pretty standard to do so now. And Common Core math may be better than how I was taught algebra, trig and calculus, for example. I don't know. But it sure seems like schools are miserable places to be these days. Especially if the subject being taught can be turned into political propaganda.
I am old enough now that most of my friends have kids in grade school. And the shit their kids are taught, even in elementary school, makes me very sympathetic to the kinds of measures Ron DeSantis has initiated in Florida. These young 20-somethings with degrees in "education" have all kinds of crazy ideas, and they seem determined to infect the next generation with the same mind-virus they caught in college: wokeness.
This is horrible. It must be stopped. We will not survive this fourth turning, if it isn't.
Most of the mass shooters come from deeply troubled backgrounds. But people with deeply troubled backgrounds aren't new, either. The only thing that's changed is that almost all kids now either do not grow up in two-parent households, or if they do, both parents work.
Thomas Sowell agrees.
Thomas Sowell is probably the single most important public intellectual in living memory. When I was younger (and believed some of the stupid things I learned in college and graduate school), I dismissed him. But that was because I lacked the experience to realize I didn't know everything. Now, I can only reflect in horror upon the stupid things I believed when I was in my 20s.
Although, in fairness, the pandemic was really my watershed moment. It was only when I saw the government's incompetent handling of the pandemic that I totally lost faith in the government's ability to do anything right. Before, my baseline assumption was that the government was capable of getting things right. After, my baseline assumption was that whatever can be fucked up, will be fucked up. Because that is what happened at every level during the pandemic.
I am reminded of what Kary Mullis said after he won the nobel prize in chemistry. Most people do not have the intellectual toolkit to be able to distinguish genuine expertise from charlatanism. That is why people like Anthony Fauci can exist at very high levels of government. Almost all the people who know enough to be able to see him for the fraud that he is, were either beholden to his control over research funding through the NIAID (academia) or had the incentive to use him to their advantage (big pharma). So, he remained in place for years while he used his position to ruin the lives and careers of anyone who challenged him (just like his equally incompetent predecessor, Francis Collins).
At the end of the day, Fauci is the textbook example of the dangers inherent to rule by so-called "experts."
I think it started with FDR and the progressives, frankly.
The FDR era was the beginning of the end of the concept of the privilege and responsibility of citizenship. FDR used the existing fabric of citizenship to draft men and employ women to fight a foreign war 10,000 miles away as a means to justify a complete restructuring of the government where the government, not the citizen is responsible for maintaining the social fabric and the social welfare. The very concept that kept the Greek and Romans so prosperous for so long was destroyed within the reign of one president.
I think I agree with this, but I don't know enough to have an informed opinion. I agree that FDR and the progressive era redefined what it meant to be an American citizen, and I think that was probably the start of the destruction of the non-state institutions that held the fabric of American society together. But I know very little about Greek and Roman history.
