What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
Thomas Sowell
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
Will and Ariel Durant
A democratic society, let alone a just, functioning society, can't survive or function without its citizens being solidly educated. And that means learning things you (or your parents), don't want you to, and some will fall behind, and drop out.
In envisioning how a more just society, in every fashion, and one that comports with reality, might be constructed, we have to concede that it can't be if people operate in a state of ignorance.
Unfortunately, we live in a manifestly ignorant age. This year's national political contest is ample evidence of that. On one side we have a body that's contemptuous of human nature and thinks it can be existentially and individually remade. On the other, we have a group that effectively assumes that everything that came after 1958 is existentially wrong, including every real advance in science or knowledge.
We let one generation somehow proceed into barbarity, and it's running the show right now. As part of that, one of its pet projects is to create a system where younger generations can be prevented from being educated in anything that suggest that it's really not 1958.
Getting back on track won't be easy, but it needs to be accomplished immediately.
Now first of all, we have to admit that this is not universal by any means. Contrary to what people like to assert, and often the poorly educated, there's no one educational system in the US and therefore there are school districts that are excellent. Wyoming has long been blessed by those, but even in Wyoming, modern inroads of limited education are advancing.
All of this may seem bold when we consider that high school graduation rates and university education is much more common than it used to be. The national high school graduation rate is 87%, which is massively high. The Wyoming rate is 82%. Consider this chart, for a moment (which will be hotlinked to its source).
| Table 110. | High school graduates, by sex and control of school: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2019-20 |
| —Not available. |
That's great, right?
Well, maybe.
But maybe not.
People have to know how to read statistics and what's behind them. A really well-educated friend of mine who is in obviously very poor physical shape is an example of this. HE takes his age, and likes to cite the "at my age, X% of men make it to age 90".
Well, that's because you kill off a certain percentage of men every year, meaning that your odds of making it to 90 are poorer every year. At age 90 100% of men make it to age 90, if they've lived that long. It's a diminishing number every year.
With education, the fact that 87% of people graduate from high school means, quite frankly, that extraordinary steps have been taken to make that occur. Some of the steps are good, some of them are bad, some of them are mixed. The rate itself, 87%, is pretty good proof that we run people through high school who really don't have the capacity to graduate a rigorous educational system.
As noted above, Wyoming's schools are very good. I was stunned, for example, when my daughter was in high school, and she came home and prepared for a test of Weimar Germany that was unbelievably advanced. This speaks well of our system. Also speaking well of it is that it offers advanced certificates for high school degrees, something it did not do when I graduated there in 1981.
And frankly, our community college system is excellent as well. We have only one university (which is another topic) but its good as well.
Still, I think it can be maintained that compared to the mid 20th Century, certain things have dropped off as mandatory subjects. I have around here somewhere a German novel that was my father's, from high school, and a Latin primer that was one of my uncle's (from a much different school system). There was a time when learning languages was mandatory in high school , and learning a language broadens out the welatanshung considerably, n'est pas?
One thing that had very much occured is the rise of homeschooling. People have done this for a long time, but it was almost freakishly uncommon in most areas and often due to remoteness. Starting in the 90s, however, it really grew for a variety of reasons.
One is that in some areas people lived in bad school districts where there was little opportunity for a good primary education. But another one is that, particularly amongst Protestant Evangelicals, and then spreading to Catholic Trads, who ironically sometimes hold very Protestant Evangelical societal views, that the education system was educating the young in vice and perversity. Most recently this has seen its expression by inroads onto school boards by populists who use names like "Mom's For Liberty" for their organizations.
What often characterizes these organizations is a desire to prevent education in something. It started off as early in the 1960s with an effort to prevent education on matters sexual. Interestingly, when I was in high school, in spite of living in the least religious state in the US, and one that has always had a rough and transient population, community standards remained so high that what there was in the way of sex ed was pretty minimal. I can recall that when I was in grade school we were supposed to watch films in 5th and 6th Grade, just as we were hitting our early teens. We watched one of them, but it conveyed so little information that it was truly harmless in the extreme, much less harmful than the information that was later distributed on the playground about what the next installment, which we never saw, was supposed to contain (which was, I'd note, biologically inaccurate). The next time this came up was in junior high, and then again in high school biology class, in which we were required to tell our parents they could opt us out. Nobody did. I think we received a day of education, or not more than two, on the topic, which was biological and accurate.
Of course, I grew up in the 70s for the most part, and most of the kids in school with me were locals. That might have made a big difference, as even the poor kids were from pretty stable families. Divorce was incredibly rare. A significant minority were from ranching families who were well aware of how biological processes worked (that Agrarian thing again) and therefore the knowledge wasn't shocking. As for the impact, I can recall five girls that I knew to some extent getting pregnant in high school, and one of them was married. One of the other ones was from a family where that ran through it like wildfire. The graduating class was 500 or so students, so that's not a huge number.
It's not just sex ed that caused the boom in alternative learning, however. By the 1970s evolution was an established scientific fact, even if still termed a theory, and it was taught in our schools outright. The resistance to it being taught, at that time, didn't seem to exist, but it rebounded strongly later on in much of the country. Overall, moreover, a decline in science teaching set in the U.S. during the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan, whose administration didn't support it.
Indeed, the Reagan administration was big on local control of things, and that has an impact here. As a Distributist, it might seem that this is one of the areas where we'd be big backers of that sort of thing, but in reality, the principal of subsidiarity advocates doing a thing at its most local effective, efficient, and just level. As knowledge is literally global, it calls for large scale. Physics and science are the same in Brooklyn as they are in Botswana.
A person might also note that our sometimes romantic attachment to Agrarianism recalls a day when less than 50% of males graduated from high school. That's quite true, but they also lived in an age in which many of them had been already well armed by their educations for the lives they would lead, so it was not accurate to suggest they were uneducated. One of my grandfathers left school (a Christian Brothers school) at age 13, and yet ran a business successfully and could do calculus. A major office building in this city is named after a man who was sent here in his early teens to open a branch of his father's pipeyard business and who went on to become a multimillionaire.
Additionally, if we go way back, we'll find that yeomanry, while they could be completely uneducated, could also be relatively well educated as well. Some were educated in basic matters through local churches, but often they were educated through community funded or subscribed schools. John Adams, who started off life as a yeoman, was educated in that fashion, and his wife ran such a school (integrated, we might note) later on.
While on it, we might as well additionally note that the American South, at least since sometime prior to the Civil War, has been a real backwater of education, something that used to horrify northerners. Little noticed, however, is that there's been a mini Great Migration of white Southerners out of their native region and into the rest of the country, where they've brought their views, including about education, with them.
And part of this is the byproduct of the 1960s. Up until the 60s, while education was massively uneven in a country that has no central education system, there was a general consensus on what a person needed to learn in order to graduate from high school. That can't really be claimed from region to region anymore.
So here, applying the principal of subsidiarity, the national government really needs to take a hand and set some basic standards, including learning the truth on scientific and historic matters. And it needs to be rigorous. If that depresses the graduation rate, so be it.
And there's really not a moment to lose.
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