by James C. Sherlock
Updated Dec 2, 5:34 PM.
Terry McAuliffe:
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Clearly, parents have not done so successfully. The Left has.
For a dramatic lesson in what the young have learned about America at enormous public and private expense, please see the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics Harvard Youth Poll Fall 2021 Top Trends and Takeaways, published yesterday. The poll of more than 2,000 18- to 29-year-olds was taken between October 26 and November 8 of this year.
Some poll results:
A majority (52%) of young Americans believe that our democracy is either “in trouble,” or “failing.”
More than half (51%) of young Americans report having felt down, depressed, and hopeless — and 25% have had thoughts of self-harm — at least several times in the last two weeks.
American Exceptionalism is a highly divisive issue among young Americans; less than one-third believe that “America is the greatest country in the world.”
In a Spring poll taken March 9-22, 2021, young people were much more hopeful. In fact, their rate of loss of hope in the last seven months could reasonably be called a crash.
Harvard has been doing this survey twice a year for 46 years. The results are not surprising. However, they will serve as a perfect Rorschach test for one’s political beliefs.
The Left will find them encouraging; the rest of us will not.
America is reaping what those who have captured the heights of the culture — the limousine Left, elite education schools, many colleges, the legacy national media, Hollywood, the music industry and the rest of the America-hating progressive cultural juggernaut — have sown for decades.
This coup happened while Americans who made the country work were going about their daily lives.
My parents’ generation won World War Two. My generation brought down the Soviet Union. Fascism and communism were defeated in a span of 50 years. America and the west had won. That was supposed to signal the “end of history.”
Now America and the west suffer assaults from their own cultural elites. The left thinks that fascism and communism had good ideas, but simply executed (excuse the expression) them incorrectly. These elites attacked from within; America and the west, looking outward, mounted no effective response.
After decades of unyielding efforts to destroy this country, the progressive Left is succeeding all around us. The Biden and Northam administrations are perfect models of dogmatic incompetence — not an ideal combination as it turns out. Race is their get-out-of-any failure card.
Education, the border, Afghanistan, China, crisis response, crime, inflation – take your pick — are rolling disasters for America. The Left has a near perfect record of taking things that have worked in the past and breaking them.
Only when you comprehend that this is their goal can you understand them.
Our public education system in the nation and here in Virginia, under the dominance of the ed-school Left for at least 50 years, has failed to educate the poor and minorities it has claimed to champion.
Even more maddening, it has given up trying. Others — see the most successful charter networks that specialize in educating poor and minority kids — do it successfully. But the Left does not want to do it that way. It’s too traditional and it works. Instead they declare those kids systemically oppressed, uneducable to modern standards, and continue to lower the standards. They deny these kids futures and agency in their own lives; and they wonder why some go astray.
They even have a name for it: school-to-prison pipeline, and the progressive fix is eliminating discipline in schools. That should help.
Parents and the rest of us who care about the future are forced to look outside the ed schools and the school administrators they have trained for solutions. They fiercely attack any such efforts. See Terry McAuliffe’s comment above.
In short, the loss of trust in America and its institutions by today’s youth has been driven by the outsized influence of the Left on those institutions. The young are not stupid. Many have been badly taught, but they clearly also have absorbed what has gone on around them.
Read their attitudes about America that Harvard has captured.
For those on the Left who see in these young peoples’ attitudes a triumph, ask yourselves: what comes next? And please share it with the rest of us if you know.
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