I grew up in a lower middle class suburb of Los Angeles, started High School in Sep’60 and took an academic slate of classes designed for college prep. These included American, English & World History & Literature, English, math, Chemistry, Physics, Gov’t, Civics, Spanish, Acapella Choir, sports and a few electives.
I don’t recall we kids being highly competitive. Roughly 30% were Hispanic/Latino. If I remember correctly only about 20-25% of us planned to go to college. In a blue collar neighborhood money was tight and parents’ main concern was that we graduate and get a job. Those college-minded thought about local Junior colleges in the area, living at home and maybe working part-time.
I wasn’t any kind of whiz kid. I did well in classes I liked, not so well in others. Overall I maintained a “B-” average and did well on exams so I was definitely college material, but due to circumstances I turned 17 in May’63, graduated June, joined the Marine Corps in August, for 4yrs. I again tested well ending at Naval Avionics School in Memphis, Tn., doing missile fire control electronics, particularly sparrows & sidewinders mounted under-wing on Phantom F4B fighters. I spent a year in Viet Nam and took a 3mo early out to go to college on the G I Bill. That was June, 1967.
I remember my high school years as a kind of limbo and simply going though the motions of attending, learning and participating. I had friends and enjoyed the experience in general, but wouldn’t say it was the greatest time of my life. It was an experience and I did what I had to do, sometimes fairly well, then moved on without thinking much about it.
It was sometime during the first year in the Corps I began to realize there were jobs and there were jobs and the latter were available to anybody who had the education, skills and desire to get ahead. It was then I began to appreciate what I had/had not learned in high school, wishing I’d tried harder to learn more, maybe ending with a solid “B” or “B+” even. I resolved to do better when I got to college.
The picture I’m trying to paint is we kids were mostly swept along, keeping out of trouble and doing what we had to do to muddle through to be ready for the next step, whatever that was. School provided the basic tools, the needful things for life ahead, and we absorbed these to greater or lesser ex-tent based on who we were, how quick we matured and how are parents and other mentors urged us along. It wasn’t until the marines I sparked to this reality, thanking my lucky stars I at least did as well as I did.
I troubled to iterate the various curricula I took to illustrate how there were no social or psycho-emotional classes informing us how we might be victims or oppressors or how we might actually be of the opposite sex, or of a neutral sex, or of racial under-privilege, or steeped in white supremacy, or of a polymorphous or homosexual disposition. There were no classes to explain these issues, options, mandates and false realities.
Our schooling prepared us for life; blue or white collar. We were swept along in the currents of 50’s/60’s educational expertise and acquired the necessary skills leading to adulthood. As I recall, California was ranked very high in testing scores across the entire high school spectrum, both here in America and around the world.
There was no effort to explain Democrats were better than Republicans or anything related to CRT or DEI or BLM or Code Pink or 1619 project or LGBTQ. There was effort to teach the merits of democratic republicanism over socialism/communism and most understood the difference. Most learned the many examples of leftist ideology in 19th & 20th centuries and how these had been complete and utter failures at the expense of hundreds of millions of innocent victims who were starved and murdered at the hands of their socialist overlords.
I argue the original purpose of schooling, particularly at the [K – 12] levels, was to teach the 3 R’s and let the rest take care of itself. The focus was on data and facts and all the minutiae that had gone into making America the greatest country on earth! There was no social engineering, no gender preferencing, no ideological 2nd guessing, no ideas about alternative lifestyles and very little exposure to religious or philosophical systems of faith other than Judeo-Christian, which was the spiritual upbringing of your average American.
The advent of these modern curricula and the attempt to indoctrinate youth into progressive ways of thinking and accepting so-called alternative life-styles, including non-conformity, Hedonism, sexual libertinism, polymorphism, satanism and lord knows how many other kinds of deviant behaviors led to the scholastic diminishment of students at every age; dumbing down if you will of the population.
This conclusion is supported by virtually every metric and measurement of academic success, as compared with both our own educational history up through the 60’s and current levels of accomplishment of these same grades measured around the world. If I’m not mistaken, [K-12] kids in Alabama and Mississippi score higher than California,
There has also been a general shift in political ideology from center-right to center-left. Far more of us support socialism and anti-nationalism as possible legitimate alternatives to our system of constitutional republicanism. This is due, in my view, to the growing emphasis across all grades and disciplines of the purported benefits of something they call democratic socialism, which is simply socialism by another name. The general population and electorate in particular under 50 were born after 1975 and schooled in the 80’s/90’s /00’s, so they were increasingly exposed/propagandized by the leftist elements previously described.
How many Democrat candidates for office are openly advocating for socialist ideals, open borders, free education and health care and/or the forfeiture of property rights, the elimination of the Supreme Court and Electoral College? How many of our Democrat friends are voting for them without realizing/admitting what they represent? In their minds they are still JFK democrats: moderates, law-abiders, believers in our founders, founding documents and principals. If roused from their stupor they’d never vote in such rogue Democrats!
In the October 2026 Issue of IMPRIMIS, Vol 55, No.10 the featured article is by Kimberley Strassel, columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Title – THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM. In it she describes and explains in great detail the wave of socialism that is sweeping our country. She agrees its been a long-time coming, insinuating its way into our government and institutions for many decades, finally in-filtrating us to a level where governmental processes and justice itself are being affected and corrupted.
She blames this, in part, on education. She believes the schools have become ideological nesting grounds for a new wave of Americans, ones schooled in the flaws and short-comings of constitutional republicanism against the merits and humanitarianism of socialism.
I am attaching a picture of the cover of the current Imprimis along with a picture of sample questions from the 8th Grade examination for Bullitt County Schools, Ky., from November 1912. I would ask each of you to read this test and see if you can answer even a smattering of the questions from every category. I hope you agree this demonstrates in robust if not absolutely certain terms the degree to which the caliber of education has fallen! These were 14/15yr olds who were mostly finishing school and entering adulthood. I don’t think today’s 12th graders or even college freshmen/sophomores could pass this test! It provides damning evidence of the failure/corruption of our schools!
You’ve Been Reading Shaneview
I’m Al Shane
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