Which circles back to my primary point. Obviously we don’t pop out of the womb understanding how to provide foundational support for an argument, or how to skeptically inspect an argument someone else has presented. Now if this generation is waiting around and playing video games all YEAR until they finally sit at the Thanksgiving table with their Republican uncles and for the first time finally have to defend a position…and they can sidestep the whole thing with “Okay Boomer”…well…I guess there are no consequences.

Ever. Not until we hit that tipping point where the public debt can no longer be serviced and the USA turns into Greece. But even at that point, they’ll just blame…the boomers.

No, my purpose was to point out that people who don’t think straight unless they are forced to by circumstance or badgered to do so by those in authority do not constitute a novel social type. I said nothing about their commonality over time, though, like other human failings, I imagine there is some ebb and flow over time periods and between countries.

Well…it’s taken me an exceptionally long time to figure out what-causes-what.

I’m not sure how history and anecdotes are going to help us with this though. It’s true that “pedagagic [sic] fads ha[ve] got[ten] hold of this nation’s teachers and school administrators,” and those are other causes that go along with the one I’ve identified. I think at this point we’ve got more control of mine. Kids would rather say “Okay Boomer” than discuss anything with us, because so many among us don’t discuss anything.

Is it your purpose to demonstrate exactly how that works? I’m picking up a vibe that you’re attempting a brand of humor or irony that escapes me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EEVMxdFxh8

Considers himself exceptional. A paragraph of statistics and rumination on educational history and society followed by one family anecdote that illustrates an individual that frustrated others.

Tom — So he thinks something for which there is no evidence it ever before existed in 5,000 years of recorded human history — interest rates that give the borrower a positive return and the lender a negative one — is just a wonderful new “policy tool”? Huh.

I take it you’re someone who fancies himself exceptional.

The top 3% means the same then as it does now. It’s a comparative measure. The ratio of Seven Sisters freshman enrollment to the size of the annual female birth cohort isn’t radically different now than it was then. After 1929, enrollment in high school was a great deal more common than it had been previously, so student bodies as a whole were less prepared than had been metropolitan high school students ca. 1925. That having been said, the composition of the high school in question was such that the academic pace was vigorous. Gentiles were a minority among those in that top 3%. She attended high school before loopy pedagagic fads had got hold of this nation’s teachers and school administrators and before criminal disorder had taken over urban schools. See Thomas Sowell on his time in high school vs. his nieces’.

She was an articulate woman whose interests tended toward the aesthetic side of life (opera, architectural history, the Philharmonic). She functioned well intellectually when a person in authority was setting standards and practices. Her teachers qualified as persons in authority, not her brother or her husband (who were continually frustrated with her).

If you’re arguing against any meaningful change having taken place lately, I dunno. Can’t use pronouns, woke this woke that, can’t sing “I feel pretty” in West Side Story. Here in California we get to see consequences. Potholes everywhere, no electricity on windy days…it has the look & feel of Atlas Shrugged being turned into an instruction manual.

Sir, I could at one time have introduced you to a cum laude graduate of a Seven Sisters college who previously had finished in the top 3% of her high school class. She fit your description to a T. This is nothing new.