Paul Rosenberg – Civilization has to be transmitted from one generation to another. If it isn’t, processes break down and life becomes difficult. Soon there must be a painful reform, or else the civilization will be lost.
This is fundamentally the job of families (especially parents), but at the moment that’s not really possible: How many families can survive on one income? And if one of the parents can’t stay home and teach the fundamental lessons of civilization, who will pass them to the next generation?
Certainly the better daycare facilities try, but to think that someone watching a couple dozen kids is going to transmit civilization to them as effectively as a parent who’s with the child day and night is simply ridiculous. The blame for this rests almost solely at the feet of the state of course, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
I’ll begin by quoting the redoubtable Fred Reed on the current situation:
We live in a dying culture and, soon, a diminished country. It cannot be saved.
Not true? Add up the bits and pieces. We laugh in horror, some of us, primarily the older, at the decline of schooling, the courses like Batman and the Struggle for Gender Equity. Comic, yes. Yet in aggregate, these constitute an academic and civilizational collapse both profound and irreversible. Enstupidation does not happen in a healthy country. Who even wants to reverse this onrushing night? Not the universities, nor the teacher’s unions, nor a professoriat gone as daft as the “students,” nor the banks battening on student loans [sic].