Millenials now have the option of taking “Adulting Classes” – privately, because the school system no longer offers Home Ec, Shop, Civics, Photography and so on. And boomer media is mocking millenials for having the practicality to go out and get the skills they have been deprived of. Because make no mistake: this is not about millenials being “coddled” or “snowflakes”. This is about boomer priorities deliberately minimizing the next generations options.

This is such an important observation: Civics (in particular) and lots of other useful things were removed from the American highschool curriculum under Republican president Ronald Reagan in the purported interests of “getting back to basics”. “Back to Basics” meant being able to read (so you could read the labels on factory buttons to know which one to push), being able to write (so you could fill in your timesheet in the factory), and being able to do arithmetic (so you could do repetetive calculations related to assembly-line work.) “Back to Basics” meant removing the critical-thinking coursework like civics; the understanding-government coursework like euclidian geometry; the developing-higher-functions coursework like Art and Music. Because only people whose critical analysis skills have been deliberately stunted, would fall for scams like “trickle-down economics”; only such shoddily-educated thinkers would accept that billionaires are “special” just on the evidence that they are billionaires; only low-functioning reasoning would accept that a reality-TV star could be a credible president!

But who is to blame for allowing a Hollywood heart-throb to become president and put economic and education policy in the hands of Reagan’s self-serving advisors? Well, it could be Richard Nixon, who realized that the only way to wrest the presidency from the democrats was to deliberately court the “cracker” vote – the undereducated class of southern segregationists who could easily be alienated from the urbanized democratic policy of the day. They were NOT traditional republicans. They became republican, and changed the very nature of the republican party, because one self-serving presidential candidate decided he could leverage racism. And because they were recruited to support the republican party entirely on the basis of their under-education, they were ripe to be flattered by the title of “The Moral Majority” as Reagan manipulatively dubbed them.

The foundation for the deterioration of American democracy that we are observing today was laid not by today’s republicans. It was deliberately laid nearly seventy years ago by individual self-serving politicians who were willing to throw away their country’s greatest strength and the prosperity of generations to come, for the thrill of self-aggrandizement.

(Source: mysharona1987, via ariannon)