On Tuesday, July 12, 2016, a radio talk-show host spoke on and on between 1:00 and 2:00PM EDT about the vast changes of Social Protocols (vis-a-vis citizen to police) and Higher Education from the Modern Era to the Post-Modern Era.  This enormously successful Radio Star is 5 years younger than I, comes from a middle-class Modern Times lawyer family in the Midwest – whereas I come from a NYC middle-class Jewish background (as did Bernard Sanders and the dramatic Talk Radio Star of the Post-Modern Era, known as Michael Savage).

My essential point revolves around the changes imposed by the Social Oligarchy on American Education from the 1950’s to the 1990’s (especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s and beyond) as America left the world of Modern Times and fully submitted to the world of Post-Modern Times (Socialized and “Progressive” and evermore “Educated” in phony “Credentials”).

When I turned 21 and was eligible to vote, I brought my high school diploma with me when I registered with the local office of the Board of Elections.  (I would bet that Bernard Sanders and Michael Savage did the exact same thing a few years earlier.)

In Modern Times, the right of the individual to vote was universally understood to be a privilege not an “Entitlement” to be used to stuff ballot boxes with PC votes from “organized” groups herding the uninformed and even the illiterate to voting booths.

Today in many states even institutionalized mental patients can be taken right into the voting booth with PC handlers who insure that their “vote” comports with all PC requirements.  (Maybe someday absentee ballots can be simply sent to Left-Wing Social Justice Idealist organizations to preclude the necessity of dragging these “voters” to the voting booth.)

The high school diploma was to prove I was both literate and had adequately learned “the rights and privileges of citizenship” (a former public school curriculum requirement formally known as “Civics”).  Had I (or Bernard Sanders or any one else) lacked a high school diploma, I would have had to pass a literacy test involving such knowledge.

Nowadays, as best I know, rightly or wrongly, only a prospective new citizen who invests years in complying with all the rules and regulations must do so.  I believe 97% of those legally “Documented” prospective new citizens take the trouble to learn how the American Political System is supposed to legally operate and, therefore, passes on their first test.  (A better percentage than driver test requirements in many jurisdictions.)

Nowadays, it is likely that only an elderly native born American or a fully legally compliant new citizen fully understands the “rights and privileges” of American Citizenship as construed in Modern Times.  And, nowadays, it is likely only a fully legally compliant new citizen has a true appreciation for the unique value of American citizenship to a morally decent individual.  (Few appreciate that unique value as much as someone who lived under Communism for years.)

In the 1960’s, Social Promotion made it possible to acquire first a high school diploma and sometime later even a college diploma without ever learning how to read.  It is not easy for an individual to think for themselves without being able to read for themselves.

There is a poignant scene in the movie “Ray” (about Ray Charles) where the blind musician is in a hotel room “Churching.”  (He was reading the bible in braille.)  Ahmet Erdogan (no relation to the Demagogue of Post-Modern Turkey) had just purchased Ray Charles’ contract for Atlantic Records around 1950 and had come to discuss their future business together.  Ray Charles, blind since early boyhood, clearly knew how to read and think for himself.  That was once universally understood as the Individual Ideal of America, however imperfectly evolving, back in Modern Times.

Way back when “CIVICS” in American Education was dropped in stages near the end of the Modern World American Public Education Era, it was largely replaced in Higher Education by “POLITICAL SCIENCE.”  (Sounds Platonic, doesn’t it?)

The Education Experts and Authorities also, in the same era, surgically removed Geography and most of Elementary School-level History, replacing it with a much more “flexible” and “progressive” course called SOCIAL STUDIES.  Social Studies could mean anything!  And Social Studies could be used to promote any BELIEF – as long as the “Educators” stay consistent – first in rhetoric and later in imposed Social Protocols.

(It is not a lot different than training a puppy not to pee on the rug.  You simply have to be CONSISTENT with the application of REWARDS and PUNISHMENTS – escalating magnitude and frequency when required.)

It must sound HYSTERICALLY FUNNY to anyone under the age of 50 who has spent any time in an American University environment, BUT:  When I was in college (CCNY), in the mid-1960’s, the only political activity I encountered in and around school was a very few students who had a not easily identifiable small political button – usually a girl who attached it to the strap of her leather handbag.

Apparently the well-to-do had been family-subsidized to “volunteer in political campaigns” since at least as far back as the Kennedy Family Political Organizations in the 1960’s.  The rich father of the third-most blatant Elective Office Political Liar in both American History and the last 25 years, Hillary Rodham Clinton, subsidized his precious little angel to be a 1964 Goldwater Girl.  (I took summer courses that year, but then I did not have a rich father subsidizing the construction of the 2 personal goals for the children of our Social Oligarchy – namely, SUCCESSFUL CAREERS and FULFILLING LIVES – the stuff that gives parents cause to boast!

The Social Oligarchy has a completely more “Sophisticated” view (than that of the common non-professional or lower middle-class majority kind of citizen) when it comes to the questions: What is Human Nature and How should one’s own children optimally grow into adults under the American Political System.  The Social Oligarchy have individually (in a social status sense) “higher aspirations”  than the common run of mankind who focus more on “private” and “family” life for “success” and “fulfillment.”

If it were not so tragic in consequence, it would be ironically funny!