My experience is much closer to Neo’s than to DNW’s but his seems to be the transition period where most of the wrecking became institutionalized.
My mother was teaching 7th grade in a small Texas town from about 1970-1990 and witnessed the decline, which finally convinced her to stop working for the school system (she claimed that she would have been fine with continuing to teach).
As one of the faculty assigned to evaluate textbooks available from the State, and sometimes to make recommendations to state committees, she said that it was clear the texts were being corrupted, but there were not enough people like her on the committees to keep it from happening.

I never heard her cuss, but she came close when talking about the NEA and other teacher unions, and the education system in general.

DNW:

You are obviously considerably younger than I am. I was speaking very specifically of my era and earlier. I am well aware that it changed later on; that was actually my point.

I grew up in NYC. Where did you grow up? Regions had different rates of change, as well. What you say about your own upbringing is interesting.

My formative memories of childhood (neighborhood play, etc.) and grade school were in the lake shore suburbs north east of Detroit.

At about 11, we moved about 6 miles further north, into a new subdivision built on disused farmland. You know the type; curving streets, larger lots, populated with “ranch colonials”, tri-levels, and extended ranch houses, all of brick, all with attached garages. Typical late mid sixties to early seventies stuff. As I have mentioned before, if your parents were adventurous types, you got a tri-level with all the latest like a central vacuum system with wall outlets, an intercom system with radio broadcasting, cool perforated bronze cone shaped directional lighting and a host of other things like mirrored sliding closet doors, modern rather than traditional looking fireplaces, and huge cylindrical pendant light fixtures made of cracked mulit-colored glass like they might have had on Star Trek – in place of brass colonial chandeliers in the dining room.

Otherwise your dad spent the money on oak floors, copper plumbing, plaster walls, fixture upgrades and boring, invisible stuff like that LOL

But, here is the thing. All that distributed prosperity didn’t seem to have the effect you would have assumed. Rather than being a piece of America remote from strife, Michigan at the time was in constant ferment.

Jerry Cavanagh styled as a possible heir to Jack Kennedy had just a few years earlier gotten himself elected by essentially inventing the politics of race-conflict alignment; and, riding that horse for all it was worth into the mayor’s office, he floundered around till it all blew up in his face, ended his career, and probably helped to kill him prematurely. “Nice work Jerome. How’d that plan work out for you?”

Of course, the nation’s Democrats are still campaigning on that model today.

So, one of the nation’s biggest urban riots had just taken place in the city proper; ambitious Irish pols were leveraging their Irishness and their progressivism into political offices on the basis of their last names, and the region was simultaneously [research has revealed] the ideological cockpit if not the spawning ground post Vatican II Catholic progressivism.

You would think that down to earth commercial cities, with good paying jobs which provided the working classes with returns that allowed them to meld seamlessly into solidly middle class life styles – at least materially – would be reservoirs of relative social tranquility.

But that never seems to have been the case in Detroit; certainly not since the mechanization of formerly stoop labor, and “the Great Postwar Migration” from the cotton field shacks of Alabama to the subsidized housing projects of Detroit.

Detroit, for all its prosperity, was just made for fervent activists; secular or religious, labor or race, ideologically driven or just corrupt opportunists.

I think that that is why you have had so many Lakes States commenters on your site, even from relatively early days, who saw where this was all inevitably going. They had lived that conflict since early childhood.

“… It’s almost amusing that you see me as part of some pack of 14-year-olds screaming at the Beatles. I was never really part of a pack like that at all (in fact, I don’t even remember packs like that where I grew up) – nor was I 14 when the Beatles got popular. I was a mite older.

Aren’t you in this scene?

You are obviously considerably younger than I am. I was speaking very specifically of my era and earlier. I am well aware that it changed later on; that was actually my point.

I grew up in NYC. Where did you grow up? Regions had different rates of change, as well. What you say about your own upbringing is interesting.

And my teachers were mostly quite old. Some of them probably started teaching in the NYC public school system in the 1920s or perhaps even earlier.

It’s almost amusing that you see me as part of some pack of 14-year-olds screaming at the Beatles. I was never really part of a pack like that at all (in fact, I don’t even remember packs like that where I grew up) – nor was I 14 when the Beatles got popular. I was a mite older.

As for myself, I was taught in school neither anything resembling an ntelligent patriotism nor anything about liberty as a virtue.

Early on as a grade schooler, I was taught Dewyism – democracy as social identification – as I think were most of my contemporaries. I actually remember a 5th grade teacher having copies of his works, or works about him, on a shelf in the classroom. Hey look, “John Dewey, Prophet of Democracy”, it says. We are a democracy aren’t we? Gosh he must be a really great guy like Grandpa or Walt Disney or something.

So that lasted until it was replaced during Jr High by a more strident form of anti-establushment skepticism, and rmoral relativism. Not all or even most teachers were blatantly ideological. It was just the default position, assumed as normal.

I mentioned the attitudes of 14 year old girls with regard to you as a paradigm case, because I was imagining you and your friends as preteens and young teens hysterically screaming at Beatles concerts.

Not so many years after that would have ostensibly taken place, my own hot on their heels cohort was populated by precocious 12 year old females whose only interests in life were trying to get away with wearing , lipstick, fishnet stockings and mimiskirts like the older girls.

Within relatively short order however that old regime was overthrown, and to the “To Sir With Love for children” look, was surprisingly if temporarily replaced by something more normal, as the replacement torn bell bottoms and tank top look had not yet penetrated downward into the backwaters of the yet further out suburban high-schools to which I had moved.

But that had no effect on the curriculum or its presentation. Our teacher pool was populated with draft dodging males and union activists and the most salient points of what we learned with regard to civics was that revolutions could be ignited and won by a determined 4%, and that our racist parents were selfish for not prefering higher taxes and cities redesigened with communal spaces, to private vacation properties.

The hirelings had not yet become the Masters. But they were flexing their muscles, and on the road to it.

We had arrived by that time at a point where it was just assumed by all supposedly intelligent people, that constitutional forms were just the superstructural impedimentia of a system of social oppression.

I assumed, given what I had been exposed to, and the smirky Maoist attitudes of those doing the exposing, that by the time I was in my early to mid twenties we ( my side) would be shooting it out with leftists in the streets in a Gotterdammerung style free for all to the knife. Then, somehow, Reagan was elected.

Lockdowns killed many. That was obvious at the time. Even more obvious now. And the lost economic wealth can never be recovered. Those trillions would have made an enormous difference in the health, wealth and standards of living of the poor and working class for years to come.

Lockdowns were the worst public policy measure in history.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, and buying products from giant international conglomerates to “stick it to the Man.”

I really am surprised you’re not aware of how the value of liberty was transmitted to school kids of the 50s and 60s. Nor do I know why you chose the age of 14, because it was actually an ongoing thing from an early age right through to the end of school, in ever-increasing complexity, and with many elements.

When young it was mainly transmitted through stories of the Founders and memorization of portions of speeches and the like, and early history lessons in the Revolution – why it happened, what they were fighting, why the lack of liberty made them angry, etc. etc.. Then there was popular culture – the books we read that extolled it, the movies we watched, the discussions we heard from our parents and their friends. Being born not all that long after the end of WWII, I certainly heard a lot about that conflict and what evils dictatorships perpetrate on populations and on innocent people,and how it was necessary to fight it.

Later there was the study of documents such as the Declaration and the Constitution. Liberty was one of the inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, incredibly precious and important – so important you even protected the right to liberty (speech,etc.) of someone with whom you disagreed. Lots of emphasis on the Bill of Rights.

Later on, history of the world and also ancient history, Greeks and Romans, and stuff about tyrants there. The lessons really were everywhere. Plays we saw, movies we watched, speeches that were given, all to emphasize liberty’s importance.

Later on, courses in college – mostly electives, for example for me courses on different forms of government, and one I’ve spoken of here before called Russian Intellectual History that taught about 19th and 20th century Russia. I read a great many Russian novels including lots by Dostoevsky, and that went into it as well.

There was also what we did not learn. We did not receive the sort of anti-liberty messages kids today receive. We were not told we were so fragile we couldn’t survive mean speech. We were told it couldn’t hurt us, and that we needed to be strong, and to fight speech with other speech. We were told that words were not the same as violence. We saw the ACLU stick up for free speech rather than oppose it.

There was much more, but I’ll just stop there.