This post was originally published on this site.
Shimer College yearbook photograph, via Wikimedia Commons.
There’s a generation of Americans who remember a different kind of school — and what’s been lost says a great deal about what’s gone wrong.
Not long ago, high school meant shop class and home economics. It meant driver’s education, typing class, and civics — real civics, not the activist version being taught today. It meant school dances, class rings, and summers spent in unstructured play where kids learned to settle their own disputes without an adult hovering over every interaction. These weren’t frivolous things. They were the building blocks of capable, self-sufficient adults.
More than half of high school seniors bought class rings in the 1980s. Today that number has dropped below twenty percent — a small detail that reflects something much larger. The traditions that once marked the passage from childhood to adulthood have quietly disappeared, and few people stopped to ask what we were replacing them with.
The answer, unfortunately, is leftist political activism and ideological programming. As schools narrowed their focus to standardized testing and liberal causes, the practical courses vanished. Home economics taught young people to cook, budget, and manage a household. Shop class built the kind of hands-on confidence that no amount of screen time can replicate. Financial literacy gave students tools they would use every single day of their adult lives. The loss of these courses has produced what we see all around us — young adults unable to fend for themselves, living in their parents’ basements long after they should have launched.
Modern psychology is now confirming what previous generations understood intuitively — that unstructured, unsupervised childhood experiences quietly build a resilience that today’s children are not developing. We scheduled and supervised the spontaneity right out of childhood, and we are paying for it.
But there are signs of pushback. Schools in Georgia, California, and elsewhere are bringing back shop classes. More than a million students have left traditional public schools in recent years for homeschooling, charter schools, and microschools. Parents are demanding substance over ideology. And the Trump administration’s effort to return education authority to the states creates a genuine opening for reform.
The goal of education was never to produce activists. It was to raise literate, moral, and capable citizens who could maintain a free society. That goal is worth reclaiming.
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