by Keith Koffler
by Kenneth Levin In recent columns, this writer has sought to address the root causes of the nation’s increasing polarization. One of the foremost of those is an education system that turns out generations of weak-thinking Americans whose command of the nation’s founding documents, civic structures, and historical foundations is virtually nonexistent — even as those same Americans are well-schooled in the nation’s shortcomings. If this effort is allowed to continue, our status as a constitutional republic and what is often referred to as the world’s “last best hope for mankind” is seriously threatened. Nationally televised congressional hearings would be a great way to begin shedding light on a contemptible dynamic that can no longer be blamed on incompetence.
It is nothing less than a concerted and coordinated effort to “fundamentally transform” the nation, and it must be exposed.
Yet there can be no mistaking the reality that the devolution of our education system has root causes as well. The failure factories otherwise known as public schools created — and nurtured — by the Democrat Education Complex are far easier to maintain in a disintegrating culture. There is a level of legitimacy in the all-too-familiar teachers’ lament that some children are “unteachable,” and that assertion is almost invariably accompanied by the reason for it: Most of these children live in circumstances that could be charitably described as “chaotic” at best — and wholly removed from anything resembling civilized norms at worst.
How did we get to that place? Before the emergence of LBJ’s Great Society, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was reserved for widows, as a means of funding once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. In the 1960s, Johnson and Congress changed the qualifications: Any household where there was no male family head present became eligible for taxpayer subsidies.
The late Patrick Moynihan predicted the calamity that would follow, especially among blacks, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate has now reached 77%, and single-parent families are mostly headed by women. Moynihan was criticized for being racist, and for assuming middle class values “are the correct values for everyone in America,” as civil rights leader Floyd McKissick asserted at the time...
~The Patriot Post
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