Dude, I Feel Your Pain

Deep down I believe that people don't really change a whole lot over time. So I get tired of all the doom and gloom, as if politics used to be a noble endeavor where everyone was civil and the engine of government used to be efficient and only recently did the discourse become nasty and waste,fraud and abuse became standard operating procedure.

Similarly, I don't believe the kids today are getting dumber - it just seems that way because they have been so poorly educated. (And yeah, I do place 85% of the blame on the teachers unions and the education establishment, but that is another topic for another day.)

Here's the type of article we ought to be seeing more of.



WWII ended 16 years before I was born; WWI 43 years before I was born, the Civil War 96 years before I was born and the Revolutionary War 180 years before I was born. I still know a good bit about all of these wars because they are seminal events in American history. It's something we should all know; it's basic cultural literacy.

And we don't anymore. UVa Professor E.D. Hirsch wrote about this phenomenon back in 1986, so it's nothing new. I probably didn't know as much about American history as my parents did.

The question is why?

I have some thoughts that answer this question in part; mainly it's because some education high ups decided that touchy-feely was better, standards got soft, and it became more fashionable to teach students about all the things America had done wrong rather than focus on the things we've done right. There is room for both, of course, but my own belief is that the failure to understand and appreciate American exceptionalism precludes any real understanding of America. Truth be told, the American political left abhors the very notion of American exceptionalism.

I don't have the answer to this conundrum - it really isn't a left/right political thing to me - but I do think it is something we need to figure out pretty quickly.