Those of us who grew up in California before it was taken over by the left were fortunate in that we actually got a good education.  We were taught all sorts of things not taught today — subjects like geography, for example.  Young people today hardly know in which hemisphere the United States exists.  This was true even back when Jay Leno was asking simple questions to people on the street many years ago.  Anyone who has seen any of the man-on-the-street videos of Jesse Watters, Mark Dice, and Ami Horowitz knows how shockingly ignorant young people are today, even, perhaps especially, on college campuses.

And they are never embarrassed by their lack of knowledge about the basics of American history.  They laugh at what they deem silly questions.  They have no idea whom the colonists fought in the Revolutionary War or from whom we won our independence.  They have no idea in what century the Civil War took place.  They know little or nothing about WWII and the Holocaust.  Americans have become dumber and dumber, and it's all been part of a plan.  The dumber they are, the more compliant they are, the easier to manipulate.  Promise them free stuff, and they will vote for you.  That's the left's long-term, regressive plan that they call progressive.

Newly minted teachers in California in 2021 face the wreckage that is education in this state.  High school kids have lists of words that can get a teacher fired if the teacher speaks them.  We all know how much great literature has been banned: Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare.  They have banned the most treasured anti-racist books because they deem them racist!  That alone is proof of the inability of those in charge of curricula to think critically.

Safer when empty (Photo credit: Wokandapix, Pixabay license).

But it hardly matters. Millions of California kids can only write in text abbreviations.  They turn in papers without a single punctuation mark or capital letter.  When corrected, they look blankly at their teacher as if he is speaking a foreign language; they truly do not know better.

But then we have leftists in the U.K. advocating an end to capital letters!  What happens there makes its way here.  The governor of Oregon signed a bill that says a student does not have to know how to read, write, or do math to graduate.  That has long been the state of affairs in California.  Kids are passed from one grade to the next without having done a lick of homework or learned a thing, which is why they show up to high school with the knowledge a third-grader had acquired in the 1950s and '60s.

For decades now, the vast bureaucracy that is the California Department of Education has seen to it that no students' feelings must be hurt, that no demands must be made of them that might show they should not advance to the next grade.  So it is hardly surprising that they arrive in high school unable to do the simplest math or comprehend elementary school reading and have no writing skills.

Of course, there are kids who have attended private schools with high standards and public school students who are motivated to learn, but they are a minority, their education compromised by their fellow students who could not care less, who do not give a thought to their own futures.  If in public high schools, these motivated students are often cheated out of their education by the majority of students who are rude, apathetic, or on their phones and see no reason to do their homework.

Teachers are required to pass them, but on to what?  A life of failure and resentment.  Resentment of whom?  Those whom they have been taught to resent — anyone who did work hard and make something of himself.  They call it white privilege no matter what their ethnicity. 

Teachers cannot prevent a student from leaving class to go to the restroom even when he knows it is to talk on the phone, because he is talking on it as he leaves class.  Teachers are prevented from confiscating students' "personal property" (phones), so even if the student is making a drug deal, the teacher cannot take the phone from him.  Then there are the trans/LGBT rules, to which all teachers must submit — "correct" pronouns, and all that that entails.  All this without any meaningful education.  The job of teaching has been absorbed by the dictates of woke social justice rules.  The teachers are forced to pass their students, no matter how unearned their matriculation. 

After a year or more of not attending school, COVID rules on campuses are extreme.  There is a COVID czar on every campus.  Teachers must take the time to make a correct seating chart each and every day for purposes of contact tracing.  How many students cooperate?  It depends.  Many enjoy complicating their teachers' responsibility by sitting in different seats each day.  Most do not fear COVID but like to taunt those who do by going maskless, as if masks made any difference at all.  If a student tests positive for COVID, everyone who sat near him must self-quarantine for two weeks.  Does anyone seriously think they will be learning anything while prevented from attending school? 

There are thousands of classrooms filled with students who have reached high school without being educated at all.  Those kids are grouped together by school administrators who view them as unreachable and unteachable but pay teachers to waste their time, expertise, and talents for show.  They idiotically foist these disinterested kids on the newest, youngest teachers when common sense suggests they would be better served under the auspices of the most experienced teachers, who may be unafraid of the laws of woke.  For those teachers who take them on, it is a thankless job, one that leaves them wanting to flee the profession.  Those young students have been cheated, as have their teachers.  California schools are a disaster.  Their state Department of Education is all theater, a sham production producing little of value.

Other cities and states are failing their students as well.  Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago...all have failing schools and are graduating students who cannot read, write, or do basic math.  Is it any wonder employers cannot find even entry-level employees to do essential jobs?  They cannot work a cash register because they often can't make change!

The left has, over the past fifty years, created an underclass that will be dependent on government for much of their lives.  The Democrats will cajole them, promise them support, and expect their votes.

If Biden's absurd spending bills pass, we are over as a nation.  The dollar will no longer be worth anything but the paper on which it is printed.  Biden is taking us down the path of Venezuela.  The elites will retain their wealth and power; the rest of us will be the peons they've made of us. 

If only we had a Republican Party that cared about any of this. But we do not. The D.C. uniparty is perennially opposed to rocking their boat of wealth and privilege.  Their kids will still go to the terminally woke Ivies, whether qualified or not.  Their kids will get plum jobs in the government or finance industry, whether qualified or not. 

The Z Man wrote a great column about how mediocrity reigns.  Indeed, it does.  That is exactly how we got to where we are today.  The country and our departments of education across the nation are run by mediocrities.  They have capitulated to every ridiculous whim of the left for decades, so we have high school students who know less than third-graders did in the 1950s and '60s.  Young teachers who set out to become teachers are finding the job without a shred of satisfaction.  Their students have no respect for them, no aim to please, no motivation to learn themselves. 

On Friday, numerous California school districts are hosting vaccination events.  For students eighteen and older, no parental consent is needed.  The students can leave any class to get the jab.  Administrators are pretty sure they can get lots of kids to submit for a few minutes out of class.  Doctors like Robert Malone have asserted that the current vaccines are expired...no longer viable because the original Wuhan virus is over and gone.  The vaccine means nothing to the delta variant, which explains why so many vaxxed people are getting sick.  Only those who have natural immunity, those who have recovered from a COVID infection, are immune.

Millions of Americans are naturally immune, but our California Department of Education is coercing kids to be unnecessarily vaccinated.  We know now that the Pfizer vax is seriously dangerous to teenage boys.  Myocarditis may well affect them all, sooner or later.  And still, our schools are hot to vax them all. 

Are we at an endgame?  Perhaps. Where will our future teachers come from?  From the same schools they went to and were passed through?  Likely.  Unless those of us who are sick to death of what the left has done to California and American education begin to fight back, we may well be over.  MLK wrote, "Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of education."  In California, they are teaching neither character nor intelligence.  Quite the opposite: California has succumbed to the lowest common denominators the left so loves.  They are cheating their captive students.  The left has destroyed this once spectacular state, and the destruction began with their assault on our schools.  The damage done is incalculable.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.