Our country’s traditions and core values are on the decline

In recent years many of our cultural values have been eroding, and in some cases are being consciously abandoned.

Standing and holding your hand over your heart during the performance of the National Anthem is a part of many activities. It is a simple but sincere way of honoring our nation and paying tribute to the opportunities it provides and its protection of personal freedom that is unparalleled in the world. Rather than honor the country that has been so good to them, some now balk at this simple act, and instead remain sitting, or “take a knee” in protest.

In fact, protest is becoming the new national pastime. Most anything that upsets somebody may well become a protest movement. A large segment of the population seemingly feels led to either start a protest, or take part in them. And some things that now upset folks are things that once were hardly noticed.

For example, some women are offended when a male in a standing position talks to a female who is sitting down. “Mansplaining,” it is called, and is considered offensive because the man is deemed to consider himself superior to the woman.

And then when a male sits and spreads his legs wide apart, that, too, is offensive to some females. They term this “manspreading,” because the male is thought to hold himself in such high regard that he can take up more space than he is due.

We also see the long-established idea of working for a living and supporting yourself and your family being abandoned in favor of welfare, food stamps and Medicaid replacing earned income. Government encourages this by making it too easy to get by without working. The ethic of getting a basic education and either going to work or continuing your education to prepare for a career no longer seems important to many people.

Sometimes economic conditions and a shortage of available jobs force people onto government support. Government imposes policies that instead of encouraging job creation often stifle it through overly strict, crippling regulations and daunting taxation, and then government spends tax revenue to support the people its policies have put on the unemployment line.

Two-parent families have given way to single-parent families, and the harm to children in that situation is often substantial. These families most often lack a father figure, whose presence can and should be a positive influence on children. And, it is becoming common for single mothers to have more children, not because they want more children so much as because they get more money from the government by doing so.

Educating children about our country’s history and values no longer takes place in many homes, and that responsibility gets transferred to schools. But then many schools no longer adequately fill that role, either. Consequently, lots of our younger citizens have no idea why America is a great place to have been born and to live, and without that understanding, proper attitudes of citizenship do not form.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many college kids cannot cope with normal events in life, and react with fear when they encounter unfamiliar or different ideas? With safe spaces and trigger warnings, even if schools still present subject matter without an ideological bias, many campuses shield students from lessons that teach about life and being an adult in the 21^st century. College life should expose young people to new and different ideas and teach them to seek truth, but too often, it does not.

Further complicating the educational experience is the widely promoted idea that everyone needs a college education, and there are ample scholarships, grants and loans available to help pay for it. Colleges are embroiled in an arms race to attract students and the money they bring with them through lavish dormitories and other facilities.

Of course, not everyone needs a college education, and not everyone can complete the requirements for a diploma. And many students pursue degrees in fields that do not allow them to support themselves. Meanwhile, thousands of good paying jobs go unfilled that less expensive vocational training would have prepared people to perform.

As the college experience continues to devolve on many campuses, a group of professors from Princeton, Harvard and Yale have introduced a program that runs counter to the developing new college environment. They encourage students to avoid crippling campus groupthink and to instead think for themselves.

Sixteen professors from the three schools signed a letter warning the Class of 2021 at their school about the danger of “falling into the vice of conformism” on campus.

Princeton Professor Robert P. George told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “We’re telling our students not to fall into that groupthink,” he said. “You should be pursuing the truth. That’s what being in college is all about. It’s learning to pursue the truth and it’s learning to become a life-long truth seeker.”

To the extent this productive attitude spreads and influences more young people, the positive college environment of old will be restored, and will produce more well-grounded young people who are prepared for adulthood. That will help a lot.

America’s schools reflect cultural problems

The news about U.S. education from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is much less than satisfactory, showing that Americans aged 16 to 34 – the so-called millennial generation – scored lower than their peers in 15 of the 22 countries participating in the assessment, despite being regarded as the most educated generation in U.S. history.

The group ranked last for numeracy, tied with Spain and Italy, and last in problem solving in technology-rich environments, tied with the Slovak Republic, Ireland and Poland.

The Educational Testing Service, which reported the results, notes that America’s huge investment in K-12 education has produced disappointing results when compared with students in other countries.

The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) commented on the report’s conclusions that “while more young Americans have attained higher education levels since 2003, those who have at least a high school education have demonstrated declining numeracy scores.”

The PIACC assessment is not the only discouraging news on the education front.

Reporting on an analysis of achievement differences in 28 countries in the Organisation (sic) for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), NCPA notes that the U.S. has a higher percentage of 15 year-old students living in single-parent families than all countries except Hungary, with the U.S. showing 20.7 percent of those students, and Hungary having 20.8 percent. The average of all countries with 15 year-olds living in single-parent families is 13.7 percent, meaning the U.S. has half again more than the average of OECD countries.

Ludger Woessman of the University of Munich performed the analysis, and NCPA notes that he reported that “single-parent homes tend to have fewer resources – and less time – to devote to their children, and various studies indicate that children of single parents in the United States face greater emotional distress and have lower educational attainment,” and that generally, “children of single-parent families score lower than students in two-parent families, on average scoring 18 points worse.”

The difference in performance between single- and two-parent families is more pronounced in the U.S., amounting to approximately one grade level, and is further affected by socio-economic status, immigration status, and parent’s education levels.

Not that additional proof is needed that our cultural decay, particularly where the family is concerned, has far reaching implications, this information ought to serve notice that if we don’t restore traditional American values and reestablish stable families, our future is bleak.

Back in 2005 Bloomberg Business reported that “Today's U.S. workforce is the most educated in the world,” citing statistics showing that 85 percent of Americans had at least a high school diploma, more than three times as many as in 1940, and that five times more Americans had a college degree over that same period.

It was this focus on education that Bloomberg cited as the reason for the U.S. economy being the world’s largest.

But Bloomberg offered this warning: “But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline,” citing a report by the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education. The report goes on to say that as highly educated baby boomers age out of the workforce, young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees, will replace them, and those replacements will earn less, and therefore drive down the standard of living.

Today we have a growing number of young people less interested in getting an education, and an education system that provides far too many of those who do go to school an inadequate education.

There are many examples where public schools seem to have renounced common sense and adopted politically correct paradigms. In one, a six year-old boy was suspended for “sexual harassment” for giving a female classmate a peck on the cheek. A high school senior was given in-school suspension for the felonious act of saying, “bless you” when a classmate sneezed. A seven year-old boy was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, and supposedly saying “Bang, bang.” An elementary school impounded a third-grade boy’s batch of 30 homemade birthday cupcakes because they were adorned with green plastic figurines representing World War II soldiers.

It is important how many Americans are high school and college graduates, but more important is that they actually command useful information that prepares them to be good citizens and get and hold a job. If we have become more concerned with infecting schools with politically correct nonsense, or focus more on test results than on making sure students know American and world history, can perform functional math, can communicate effectively, understand basic science and economics, and can think critically, diplomas and degrees will mean little or nothing.

Education must again become purely the domain of states and localities, and parents must have not only primary responsibility for how their kids perform in school, but they must also have the ability to send their kids to schools that perform best.

When you are self-absorbed, you can’t see the forest for the trees

Life provides lessons for us in unusual ways. Occasionally, it is someone totally missing something obvious that provides the lesson. Here is a very good example of that.

A photograph posted on Facebook shows a woman holding up a sign. The sign says: “I have a Master of Arts degree in Women’s Studies. However, the only job I can find is as a bartender at a local restaurant. I owe over 60k in student loans. I am forced to rely on food stamps and WIC to support my son. Is this the ‘American Dream’ I worked so hard for? I am the 99 percent occupywallstreet.org.”

The lesson is there for all to see, but the woman – let’s call her “Ms. OWS,” – not only didn’t learn from her experience, she didn’t even suspect there was a lesson there. That experience was only an opportunity to complain that America hasn’t provided a better life for her.
The lesson that unless you are independently wealthy or have someone to support you while you go to school, you don’t borrow 60 grand to pursue a degree in a subject area that will not equip you to support yourself and your child and pay for the education that you have just received totally escaped her notice.

Like the make-believe class college kids used to joke about, “Underwater Basket Weaving,” Women’s Studies, is not a viable career field. To prepare for supporting yourself you study accounting, engineering, computer technology, law, medicine, chemistry, elementary or secondary education, or one of the other majors where jobs are available. But Ms. OWS, probably without a gun to her head, instead chose Women’s Studies.

The Occupy Wall Street movement with which Ms. OWS so closely identifies, includes some pie-in-the-sky idealism, like:
    •    The right to economic justice, including a living wage for all, regardless of the job, or the level of skills or experience one has
    •    Debt forgiveness for all debts
    •    Free college education
    •    Open borders

These goals are not merely unrealistic; they are dangerous. None would be good either for the country or for its inhabitants. Someone has to pay for the higher wages, the free college education, and the debt forgiveness, and that won’t be the people who think about life like Ms. OWS does; it will be the people who approach adulthood responsibly, and prepare to take care of themselves.

Movements like Occupy Wall Street seem to attract those disaffected souls who, for whatever reason, have not learned what life is about, expect to be provided for, and become indignant when life does not provide to them the rewards to which they believe they are entitled, due to nothing more significant that they were not aborted and draw breath.

Like Ms. OWS, they float through life indulging in the things they like, neglecting to seek out things that will prepare them for life as a responsible citizen, and then contributing to society and the wellbeing of our country.

Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. We have a segment of our society that imagines it is possible to achieve Utopia, and a large group of pandering vote-seekers all too willing to promise it to them, and who provide a few goodies at taxpayer expense in return for votes and a cushy career in government.

And then there’s government, itself, at all levels. Even in cases where young people show some initiative, and take steps to help themselves, they are often thwarted by bureaucratic absurdity, as in these examples reported by The Daily Signal:

** Chloe Stirling started a business in her kitchen called “Hey, Cupcake!” In addition to selling her goods to friends and neighbors, she donated some to charitable events, including a fundraiser for a student with cancer, and delivered cupcakes to residents in a senior home. Not good enough! Illinois health officials declared that she lacked the necessary permit to operate and told her to close up shop.

** A zoning official in Holland, Mich. shut down a 13-year-old’s hotdog stand because he was supposedly competing with nearby restaurants.  Nathan Duszynski had planned to sell hotdogs to raise money for his disabled parents. The boy’s mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. Within minutes of opening his stand, a zoning official ordered him to cease operating because he lacked a license.

Bah! Humbug!

Is this a great country, or what? On the one hand there’s a substantial number of people who think they are entitled to whatever they think they are entitled to, and lack the motivation to get off their duffs and earn their rewards, and on the other hand people in government stupidly apply rules to punish young people who take the initiative to earn something through work.

But then there was a pleasant breeze of tolerance and common sense wafting its way north from Dunedin, Fla. where 12-year-old T.J. Guerrero operates a lemonade stand to raise money for summer activities with his friends and family. After one neighbor complained to the city, Mayor Dave Eggers visited the stand, enjoyed some lemonade, and praised the youngster’s initiative.

Perhaps all is not lost. But we must be vigilant.