I have to be careful because most of my family considered themselves to be “educators”. My Father was a teacher in a one room school house for many years. Many of aunts and uncles were teachers. My dad had the final test for 8th graders from the old days that made me wonder. It asked questions about the span of a bridge over a ravine and how much it could bear before it collapsed under the weight of a certain train. I remember thinking that I couldn’t understand the question let alone do the math. People hiring new graduates today tell me that they cannot do simple math and they cannot give change at a cash register. They have to literally have their phones taken away before they go to work. I heard a story of a man in Lowe’s who asked one of the employees where to locate something and the young man said “how should I know?’ and walked away. That would be an egregious sin if you listen to the Lowes commercial and read their mission statement. Stories are told of recent college graduates with loads of college debt hiring at some pretty good jobs at some pretty prestigious places having to attend remedial classes to get them up to a minimum standard of work knowledge. One begins to wonder what students learned in all those classes that cost so much in the first place? Classes like “Sexism in the Marvel Multiverse” might be fun but it doesn’t help you learn how to deal with real people in the real world. At some point we might have to admit that the public education everyone thought was the crown jewel of a liberal democracy is a deadly disaster.
We are faced with the spectacle of adults moving back to live with their parents and it really is frightening from a sociological perspective. Back in the day when we were primarily an agricultural society, the four generation household was common. In the post industrial world it is an issue because the job market is volatile and the displacement of families is a part of the new world of work, especially in the high job market.
Our public education system has also done tremendous damage to our churches and schools because it secularized our young people and basically created a nanny state.
Here is a blast from the past – Around the time I was born in 1952 a man by the name of Dr. M.E. Sadler said at the 39th meeting of the Association of American Colleges in Los Angeles and said –
“As applied to our education, we have interpreted the great principle of religious freedom to mean freedom from religion and have permitted the development of an educational system which has produced a secularized, materialized society. Nothing could have been farther from the desires and purposes of our fore-fathers than the
stupid interpretation which we have given to their great principle of religious freedom. They wanted freedom of religion, but they wanted religion. Schools have proceeded on the entirely false assumption that if they did not teach religion, they would be neutral. Any school in America which does not teach theism is actually teaching atheism. Children and young people are encouraged in the belief that they will find in their school education a preparation for the important things in life. When they do not find religion in such a school, a powerful negative impression is made on their minds. Our schools cannot prepare the kind of citizens we need unless and until they do return. pure religion to its rightful place in education.”
