01-10-2018, 04:11 PM
(01-09-2018, 04:06 PM)Galen Wrote:(01-09-2018, 09:37 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:(01-09-2018, 05:54 AM)Galen Wrote:(01-08-2018, 02:17 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Criticize the public schools all that you want, but you do not want a collection of minors lacking competent adults to keep them from doing stupid and destructive things.
That has happened before, you call them Generation X and the nominal adults were the Baby Boom Generation. So far the Boomers in general still aren't competent.
I would argue that Boomers by and large aren't adults either.
No kidding. Generation X had little choice but to grow up and get competent because otherwise it didn't end well. I can tell you from personal experience that the government sponsored youth internment camps seemed to be lying to us most of the time.
1. Generation X did go to school.
2. The schools had rules. Teaching was to rigid a career to satisfy the peace-love-dope types. Besides, GIs were teaching K-12 as late as 1990, and by 1990, Generation X had started teaching.
Of course many Boomers did extend their childhoods into the time in which they should have abandoned such a role (when having children). Teenage parents have been infamously incompetent in parental roles, and adults maintaining teenage behavior into their late 20s could be similarly awful. As any teacher knows, someone must take the adult role in a classroom, and that is part of the informal but implicit job description.
3. There were Boomers who acted 40 when they were teenagers.
Most Boomers took on adult roles when economic reality kicked in... if they wanted to keep participating in the consumer society or when parental support for their Voyages to the Interior came to an end.
Boomers who have endured economic hardship have been compelled to mature, even if the maturing process began with "Do you want fries with that?" But the elite Boomers of wealth and bureaucratic power, few of whom had an extended stay in the Voyage to the Interior, have been extremely competent at keeping competition from others at bay while bleeeding society of resources that they use for their extreme indulgence.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.