Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?

A little unusual for here, but somewhat connected:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?: Post war news items were getting a bit weird. Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a frea...

Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?

Post war news items were getting a bit weird.

Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a freak show star for a brief period of time.

Life magazine featured a black and white cover photo of a UAW worker.  The contents of the magazine were:

Pg… 29 The Week's Events: U. S. Occupies Japan

Pg… 42 The Week's Events: Editorial: Peace in Asia

Pg… 45 The Week's Events: King Leopold's Family

Pg… 51 The Week's Events: Black Markets Boom in Berlin

Pg… 127 The Week's Events: Lilly Dache Packs for Paris

Pg… 63 Articles: Nijinsky in Vienna, by William Walton

Pg… 112 Articles: As We May Think, by Vannevor Bush

Pg… 103 Photographic Essay: United Automobile Workers

Pg… 57 Modern Living: House for Texas

Pg… 90 Modern Living: The French Look

Pg… 61 Art: Portrait of Sylvia Sidney, by Fletcher Martin

Pg… 82 Art: Hudson River School of Painters

Pg… 75 Movies: "Uncle Harry"

Pg… 97 Sports: Grownups Spin Tops

Pg… 138 Science: Plant Cancer

Pg… 2 Other Departments: Letters to the Editors

Pg… 12 Other Departments: Speaking of Pictures: Germany's Fantastic Secret Weapons

Pg… 16 Other Departments: LIFE's Reports: "Bottoms Up" in China, by Lieut. Thomas P. Ronan

Pg… 132 Other Departments: LIFE Goes Swordfishing

Pg… 142 Other Departments: Miscellany: Seabees Give Waves a Party

Life is often remembered as a great magazine in its heyday, but it featured some pretty vapid articles.  This issue's feature on The French Look informed readers that young French women had small breasts and often went braless, depicting a typical bra (on a young French woman), for those occasions in which les mademoiselles wore them.  Doing that in the US, UK, or Germany would have been regarded as shockingly indecent, although it was not uncommon in the Southern European Slavic and Romance language speaking countries, which in turn contributed to the American and British views that the Italians were really primitive, and the German view that the Yugoslavians were.

In case you wonder, I ran across the Life magazine item searching this date on Twitter.  I haven't pulled up the article.

I'm clueless on the truth or accuracy of that claim and not going to investigate it, but French living conditions were definitely different than American ones, with a significantly different diet. Most people and cultures today are significantly thinner than Americans are and in the 1940s the French had suffered years of near starvation conditions, so they were likely overall less bulky than Americans in every manner.  A 20 year old French woman in 1945 had lived her teen years in starvation conditions and had been on pretty thing rations throughout the 1930s.  She would have been smaller in every way.

Also, French clothing had been severely rationed during the Second World War and you can't wear clothes you just don't have.  Americans have largely forgotten, indeed never appreciated, the extent to which World War Two causes massive food and material deficits during the Second World War.

Added to that, Americans for some reason think of the French as being Parisians, which most are not.  Paris had been the center of the fashion industry since at least the mid 19th Century, but that didn't apply to most of the French.  About 50% of the French were rural in 1940, down from 64% in 1920, but still a very large percentage.  As late as 1960 about 40% of the French were rural.

This oddly ties into this topic as rural life isn't like urban life, including in terms of the clothing people wear.  Starting in the late 19th Century French and British artists began to glamorize the agrarian life and left a fair number of romantic, but fairly realistic, paintings of it.  Some British paintings of rural life show farm women working fields in the hot summer months flat out topless, something you would not associate with either the UK or British farming today.  French paintings can be a shock to run across while as they're often very well done and beautiful, they also make it relatively apparent that French farm women in hot months were wearing light cotton blouses with nothing underneath them.

European agriculture was much slower to mechanize than American agriculture.  The Great Depression had an enormous retarding effect on the mechanization of American agriculture and this is even more so for European agriculture, which remained largely equine or bovine powered before the end of World War Two, another thing contributing to starvation as horses were conscripted for the German Army and cows and bulls just shot and ate them.  Here, however, this is significant as French men and women were working the fields largely in the same way as they had in 1918.

Brassiers are actually a French invention, makign their appearance in the 1880s, as we've discussed before, and they received a boost due to World War One, as we addressed here:

As early as the 1880s, a French women involved in fashion had introduced the brassier, a total alternative for the corset.  It was not widely accepted, but due to World War One it was soon to be.

At the Great War in 1914 nearly every woman would have owned corsets.  By that time, the majority of them would have had one the less restrictive type.  And then the war came.

Women employed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1917.  All of the clothing here, except for the women who appear to be employed as domestics by the railroad, would have been highly problematic for their occupations.  They're wearing, it might be noted, a lot of loose clothing, which is likely in part due to their bulky undergarments.

As we've already noted, World War One pulled thousands of women into work they weren't already doing.  A fair amount of that work was industrial.  Lots of women went to work everyday wearing corsets of the less restrictive type, but all corsets were singularly unsuitable for the work that thousands of women were doing.  The bra was.  Not insignificantly, Crossley patented her brassier on November 13, 1914.

New York National Guard bandsman Edwardina Lavoie, 1917.  This photograph demonstrates a woman wearing what is likely a male uniform which would have required a least a partial change in the development of ladies' undergarments in the form of more modern underpants, another thing that was coming in at this time.  No wearing bloomers with breeches.

As noted, things don't change overnight.  So, maybe, young women coming of age in Paris in the 1940s who had an okay income or who had parents who did, might have a more advanced clothing standard then, say, a young woman growing up in rural Normandy, even if that young woman had moved into Paris during the war. 

And, shall we noted this, in 1914-1918 Americans had been absolutely charmed by the French, and American men had been charmed by French women.  But those men were largely rural and they were meeting women who were largely rural.  In 1918, 20% of American homes had full indoor plumbing, meaning most did not. By World War Two most Americans homes did, although quite a few very rural ones did not.  Most Americans were no longer rural by 1945.  

In 1940 only 5% of French homes had indoor plumbing.  The percentage for Italy was lower.

5%.  

Perhaps not too surprisingly, therefore, lots of American troops were fairly horrified by the French, contrary to the way we like to remember it, when they started landing on French soil in 1944.  The French, to put it mildly, smelled.  And if the French smelled, the Italians smelled worse, with Italian women wearing cotton dresses in hot weather in which their upper lady bits flopped out, combined with omitting shoes and going around in bare feet.  They were hopelessly primitive, in American eyes (which as noted is how the Germans found the Yugoslavians).

Anyhow, if you don't have indoor plumbing, you aren't going to be able to easily frequently wash your clothes and if you can omit something, you probably are going to.

Additionally, if you live in those conditions, and those of the 30s and early 40s, you are probably 40% underweight, smoke cigarettes constantly, have a large percentage of your caloric intake depending on alcohol, and you smell bad.

That's okay if everyone you associate with also is underweight and unwashed.

Things weren't like imagine them to be back then.  Glamorous French women? Sure, on their own terms in the conditions in which they found themselves.

Life today is now a sort of special issue magazine featuring photographs.  It's very large size format always existed, but it was originally a weekly and was so until 1972.  It's big competitor was Look, which ceased publication in 1971.  That both of these magazines took a hit in the early 1970s is really interesting is at long predates the Internet, which would otherwise be blamed for it.

Anyhow, Life was always a photo magazine, of which there were several others.  It was a serious one, but right from its onset in 1936 (interesting to note it came out during the Great Depression) it frequently featured cheesecake, running racy photographs of actresses and semi undressed women on the guise of discussing clothing or fashion.  Some of the photographs even today are shocking if you are not anticipating them.  In 1953 it went full pornography for the first time running a nude of Marilyn Monroe which would be the same photograph used as the very first Playboy centerfold in 1953.  The excuse, and probably the actual motivation, for that is that by doing that it was attempting to save the career of Monroe, who would be scandalized if her nude, taken in the late 1940s before she was a well known and up and coming actress, appeared first in a pornographic magazine, but still there's the only difference between the two publications of the image is the purpose the magazines served.

Anyhow, this is interesting in that Life and Look were general publication magazines that were outright flirting with cheesecake very early on, showing an (unfortunate) evolution on community standards.  We've looked at this in the past, but this is certainly good evidence that whatever was going on in the culture was going on before World War Two and before the 1950s.

The Allied Control Commission decided to transmit to all neutral states a request for the return to Germany of "all German officials and obnoxious Germans".

Sweden resumed allowing foreign warships to enter its territorial waters.

MacArthur ordered the dissolution of the Imperial general headquarters and imposed censorship on the press.

The Shangdang Campaign began in the Chinese Civil War between the Eighth Route Army and Kuomintang troops led by Yan Xishan in what is now Shanxi Province, China.

The Indonesian Navy was founded.

The USS Midway was Commissioned

José Feliciano was born in Lares, Puerto Rico.

Related threads:

Clothing: It was because of World War One.

Labels: 1910s, Clothing, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Men, Standards, The roles of men and women, Women, World War One, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Last edition:

Friday, September 7, 1945. Green River Railroad Bridge Fire. A final and unnoticed parade.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Armor, Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman, It was because of World War Two, Japan, Railroads, The Post War Economy Myth, Transportation, Union Pacific Railroad, World War Two, Wyoming (Green River)

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 64th Edition. Things authentic and important.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 64th Edition. Things ...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 64th Edition. Things authentic and important.

Why there?

On Saturday, March 30, Pro Hamas protestors interrupted the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

Why St. Patrick's?

For the same reason, most likely, that LGBTQ+ figures had a protesting funeral there recently. People are drawn to Catholic places, as they're real, and therefore attention is paid to them.

Why her?

Courtney Love, in an interview with Standard, stated; "Taylor is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist."

This followed Billie Eilish criticizing, sort of anonymously, "wasteful artists" who put out multiple vinyl editions, an apparent softball for sustainability.  She later said her comments weren't directed at Swift.

Hmmm. . . 

Why are these chanteuses dissing Taylor?  

I don't really know, but I will note that Love commenting on who is important and interesting in laughable.  Is Love "important" or "interesting"?  If she is, she might be interesting as she's the late wife of the tragic Curt Cobane, whom I don't find to have been particularly important, but certainly tragic.  And for Eilish, she's sort of a teenage train wreck who probably needs to get over her weird diet and flipping between hiding her form and flaunting it.

Taylor is interesting because she's a musical success.  I don't like her music, which I find to be juvenile, but I will note that appearance wise she's a throwback almost to the 1940s, and appears to have gained success while being basically normal in every fashion.  

Culturally, therefore, she might be sort of important in a way.

Love, and Eilish, on the other hand, might be fairly unimportant in every sense.  Musically, right now, it's hard to see what actually is important.  Whoever they are, they aren't in pop music.  

Indeed, much of society seems to be grasping for the authentic and important right now, without much out there in the culture offering it.

Appearances

Back in November, I posted this item:

What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.

Since that time, this trend locally has noticeably increased.  It's really remarkable.

For whatever reason, I'm a student of people, so I take notice of what they wear.  I'm probably in a minority of sorts that way.  What people wear at Mass is a common topic in Cyber Catholic circles, but the recent turn towards the conservative amongst young, white, female Catholic parishioners is really remarkable.  It's a real rejection of the cultural norm of our era.

Indeed, very recently, even amongst those young women who were part of this group, there's suddenly a change.  One young woman who is routinely at Mass with her family on Sundays, and who typically showed a lot of shoulder (no, there's no problem with that) is now covering up hugely.  Something's changed.  It doesn't, however, carry over to Hispanic or Native American young women, both of whom continue to dress the way they have.  Hispanics have always dressed very conservatively at Mass, but not in a trad fashion. They're keeping on keeping on with that.

News, real news but in a rumor fashion, leaked out recently that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Byzantine Church is looking at putting in a mission in Casper, which would be a mission of a mission.  I don't know how many Ukrainian Catholics there may be in town, but I'll bet it's a tiny number.  I also bet that the mission church that's thinking of establishing a mission here, which is out of Cody, serves a mostly non-Eastern Rite community.  

Something is going on there too.  At a time at which some in the Latin Rite seem focused on a topic that's frankly jumped the shark, by and large, and which is really a matter of European culture, not biology, the young and rank and file in the pews seem to be moving on.  

Becoming a parody of yourself

One of the risks of taking the long reach for something is that you can end up actually becoming unauthentic in your quest for authenticity.

I'm reminded of Courtney Love again.

On her Wikipedia page, there's a picture of Love wearing a kokoshnik, a stiff hat associated with Russian women.  Russian women don't wear them anymore, and I'm sure they haven't for eons.  She's wearing it with a miniskirt.  It looked absurd, but was probably meant to make a statement.  Or here's another example:

The kind of dumb stuff you say when you actually really care about "your 'basic' fashion sense".

I don't know who Japanese Breakfast is (or for that matter what an actual Japanese breakfast is) but they've showed up on this Twitter headline:

Japanese Breakfast is too busy returning to Coachella and making 'music for bottoms' to care about your 'basic' fashion sense

Oh, bull.  That's the exact thing you say when you've tuned your fashion sense to look like you don't have a fashion sense, so you can appear to stay edgy for Coachella.

M'eh.

Exactly.  

I note this as in the pews are a young couple, they're not married but perhaps engaged, whose family I somewhat know.  From a very conservative background, they're trying to affect the disaffected but conservative look to the max.  Unwashed hair and, for the young man, probably third or fourth hand overcoats from the 1970s with huge hounds tooth pattern. The young woman wears, of course, a chapel veil but also is affecting plain to the maximum extent possible, which is detracting a bit from her appearance.  I do love her very round, plain glasses, however.

Anyhow, when going for something crosses over into sort of a parody, you've gone too far.

Lost

Anyhow, I think this trend has been going on for a while.  It explains the entire Hipster look that's still with us, and was much in force several years ago.

Some days, when I leave the office, there's a young woman coming in.  She's either a Native American or a Hispanic from somewhere south of the border.  She's always dressed very conservatively, with dresses that remind me of what Latin American women traditionally wear.  She always has a big smile when you see and acknowledge her.

She's authentic.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 63d Edition. Strange Bedfellows.

Apostolic Christianity, Catholic, Donald Trump, Education, homosexuality, Israeli Hamas War, law, Mormon, Pope Francis, religion, Sex, theology, Zeitgeist

Lex Anteinternet: Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture

Lex Anteinternet: Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden...: From the Cowboy State Daily: Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture The real thing that wi...

Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture

The real thing that will affect agriculture, particularly the beef industry, is in failing to attempt to arrest climate change.

I've long been utterly baffled by; 1) grazers failure to get a clue over climate change, and 2) ongoing agricultural admiration for the Republican Party.

More than anyone, those who graze ought to be able to freakin' wake up and notice that the climate ain't what it used to be.  I'll hear ranchers talk about it, but they seem incapable of closing the circle. Gee, it's been warm. Gee, it's been dry. Gee, we have no grass.

D'uh.

But climate change? Nope, not happening.

Now there are some exceptions. The late Pat O'Toole, who married into a Carbon County ranching family, was one.  But by and large ranchers simply refuse to believe that something is happening, even while worrying about what is happening.

Hmmm. . . 

And ironically, practices in the industry which gave it a larger carbon footprint are quite recently  Older ranchers can easily look back on an industry that wasn't diesel powered.

On the GOP, ranchers seem to have a really dedicated belief that the Republican Party protects their ability to do what they want.  In reality, the Democrats have preserved ranch lands themselves. The GOP is more of the development party, which never ends up actually benefitting ranchers.  I'll them complain about this too, but not close the circle.  Why is this oil company in my pasture?  Why are squatters trailers showing up all over.  Why are out of state rich buying this up and not doing anything about it?

Why indeed?

Maybe because of how we vote and whose support we choose to ignore.

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Thomas Sowell

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Will and Ariel Durant

A democratic society, let alone a just, functioning society, can't survive or function without its citizens being solidly educated.  And that means learning things you (or your parents), don't want you to, and some will fall behind, and drop out.

In envisioning how a more just society, in every fashion, and one that comports with reality, might be constructed, we have to concede that it can't be if people operate in a state of ignorance.

Unfortunately, we live in a manifestly ignorant age.  This year's national political contest is ample evidence of that.  On one side we have a body that's contemptuous of human nature and thinks it can be existentially and individually remade.  On the other, we have a group that effectively assumes that everything that came after 1958 is existentially wrong, including every real advance in science or knowledge.

We let one generation somehow proceed into barbarity, and it's running the show right now.  As part of that, one of its pet projects is to create a system where younger generations can be prevented from being educated in anything that suggest that it's really not 1958.

Getting back on track won't be easy, but it needs to be accomplished immediately.

Now first of all, we have to admit that this is not universal by any means. Contrary to what people like to assert, and often the poorly educated, there's no one educational system in the US and therefore there are school districts that are excellent. Wyoming has long been blessed by those, but even in Wyoming, modern inroads of limited education are advancing.

All of this may seem bold when we consider that high school graduation rates and university education is much more common than it used to be.  The national high school graduation rate is 87%, which is massively high. The Wyoming rate is 82%.  Consider this chart, for a moment (which will be hotlinked to its source).

Table 110.

High school graduates, by sex and control of school: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2019-20

School year	High school graduates								Averaged freshman graduation rate for public schools3	Population 17 years old4	Graduates as a ratio of 17-year-old population
	Total1	Sex		Control
		Males	Females	Public2			Private
				Total	Males	Females	Total
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8		9	10	11
1869-70	16,000	7,064	8,936	—	—	—	—		—	815,000	2.0
1879-80	23,634	10,605	13,029	—	—	—	—		—	946,026	2.5
1889-90	43,731	18,549	25,182	21,882	—	—	21,849	5	—	1,259,177	3.5
1899-1900	94,883	38,075	56,808	61,737	—	—	33,146	5	—	1,489,146	6.4
1909-10	156,429	63,676	92,753	111,363	—	—	45,066	5	—	1,786,240	8.8
1919-20	311,266	123,684	187,582	230,902	—	—	80,364	5	—	1,855,173	16.8
1929-30	666,904	300,376	366,528	591,719	—	—	75,185	5	—	2,295,822	29.0
1939-40	1,221,475	578,718	642,757	1,143,246	538,273	604,973	78,229	5	—	2,403,074	50.8
1949-50	1,199,700	570,700	629,000	1,063,444	505,394	558,050	136,256	5	—	2,034,450	59.0
1959-60	1,858,023	895,000	963,000	1,627,050	791,426	835,624	230,973		—	2,672,000	69.5
1969-70	2,888,639	1,430,000	1,459,000	2,588,639	1,285,895	1,302,744	300,000	5	78.7	3,757,000	76.9
1970-71	2,937,642	1,454,000	1,484,000	2,637,642	1,309,319	1,328,323	300,000	5	78.0	3,872,000	75.9
1971-72	3,001,553	1,487,000	1,515,000	2,699,553	1,342,275	1,357,278	302,000	5	77.4	3,973,000	75.5
1972-73	3,034,822	1,500,000	1,535,000	2,728,822	1,352,416	1,376,406	306,000	5	76.8	4,049,000	75.0
1973-74	3,073,314	1,512,000	1,561,000	2,763,314	1,362,565	1,400,749	310,000	5	75.4	4,132,000	74.4
1974-75	3,132,502	1,542,000	1,591,000	2,822,502	1,391,519	1,430,983	310,000	5	74.9	4,256,000	73.6
1975-76	3,142,120	1,552,000	1,590,000	2,837,129	1,401,064	1,436,065	304,991		74.9	4,272,000	73.6
1976-77	3,139,536	1,551,000	1,589,000	2,837,340	—	—	302,196		74.4	4,272,000	73.5
1977-78	3,128,824	1,546,000	1,583,000	2,824,636	—	—	304,188		73.2	4,286,000	73.0
1978-79	3,101,152	1,532,000	1,569,000	2,801,152	—	—	300,000	5	71.9	4,327,000	71.7
1979-80	3,042,214	1,503,000	1,539,000	2,747,678	—	—	294,536		71.5	4,262,000	71.4
1980-81	3,020,285	1,492,000	1,528,000	2,725,285	—	—	295,000	5	72.2	4,212,000	71.7
1981-82	2,994,758	1,479,000	1,515,000	2,704,758	—	—	290,000	5	72.9	4,134,000	72.4
1982-83	2,887,604	1,426,000	1,461,000	2,597,604	—	—	290,000	5	73.8	3,962,000	72.9
1983-84	2,766,797	—	—	2,494,797	—	—	272,000	5	74.5	3,784,000	73.1
1984-85	2,676,917	—	—	2,413,917	—	—	263,000	5	74.2	3,699,000	72.4
1985-86	2,642,616	—	—	2,382,616	—	—	260,000	5	74.3	3,670,000	72.0
1986-87	2,693,803	—	—	2,428,803	—	—	265,000	5	74.3	3,754,000	71.8
1987-88	2,773,020	—	—	2,500,020	—	—	273,000	5	74.2	3,849,000	72.0
1988-89	2,743,743	—	—	2,458,800	—	—	284,943		73.4	3,842,000	71.4
1989-90	2,574,162	—	—	2,320,337	—	—	253,825	6	73.6	3,505,000	73.4
1990-91	2,492,988	—	—	2,234,893	—	—	258,095		73.7	3,417,913	72.9
1991-92	2,480,399	—	—	2,226,016	—	—	254,383	6	74.2	3,398,884	73.0
1992-93	2,480,519	—	—	2,233,241	—	—	247,278		73.8	3,449,143	71.9
1993-94	2,463,849	—	—	2,220,849	—	—	243,000	5	73.1	3,442,521	71.6
1994-95	2,519,084	—	—	2,273,541	—	—	245,543		71.8	3,635,803	69.3
1995-96	2,518,109	—	—	2,273,109	—	—	245,000	5	71.0	3,640,132	69.2
1996-97	2,611,988	—	—	2,358,403	—	—	253,585		71.3	3,792,207	68.9
1997-98	2,704,050	—	—	2,439,050	1,187,647	1,251,403	265,000	5	71.3	4,008,416	67.5
1998-99	2,758,655	—	—	2,485,630	1,212,924	1,272,706	273,025		71.1	3,917,885	70.4
1999-2000	2,832,844	—	—	2,553,844	1,241,631	1,312,213	279,000	5	71.7	4,056,639	69.8
2000-01	2,847,973	—	—	2,569,200	1,251,931	1,317,269	278,773		71.7	4,023,686	70.8
2001-02	2,906,534	—	—	2,621,534	1,275,813	1,345,721	285,000	5	72.6	4,023,968	72.2
2002-03	3,015,735	—	—	2,719,947	1,330,973	1,388,974	295,788		73.9	4,125,087	73.1
2003-047	3,054,438	—	—	2,753,438	1,347,800	1,405,638	301,000	5	74.3	4,113,074	74.3
2004-05	3,106,499	—	—	2,799,250	1,369,749	1,429,501	307,249		74.7	4,120,073	75.4
2005-06	3,122,544	—	—	2,815,544	1,376,458	1,439,086	307,000	5	73.4	4,200,554	74.3
2006-07	3,198,956	—	—	2,892,351	1,413,738	1,478,613	306,605		73.9	4,297,239	74.4
2007-08	3,313,818	—	—	2,999,508	1,466,303	1,533,205	314,310	5	74.7	4,436,955	74.7
2008-098	3,318,770	—	—	3,004,570	—	—	314,200		74.7	4,336,950	76.5
2009-108	3,306,220	—	—	2,991,310	—	—	314,910		75.6	4,311,831	76.7
2010-118	3,251,720	—	—	2,937,170	—	—	314,550		—	—	—
2011-128	3,221,990	—	—	2,905,990	—	—	316,000		—	—	—
2012-138	3,200,130	—	—	2,890,740	—	—	309,390		—	—	—
2013-148	3,176,300	—	—	2,868,100	—	—	308,200		—	—	—
2014-158	3,170,560	—	—	2,872,470	—	—	298,090		—	—	—
2015-168	3,201,060	—	—	2,906,330	—	—	294,730		—	—	—
2016-178	3,223,000	—	—	2,933,220	—	—	289,780		—	—	—
2017-188	3,273,690	—	—	2,988,630	—	—	285,060		—	—	—
2018-198	3,265,020	—	—	2,984,530	—	—	280,490		—	—	—
2019-208	3,245,900	—	—	2,953,060	—	—	292,840		—	—	—

—Not available.

That's great, right?

Well, maybe.

But maybe not.

People have to know how to read statistics and what's behind them.  A really well-educated friend of mine who is in obviously very poor physical shape is an example of this.  HE takes his age, and likes to cite the "at my age, X% of men make it to age 90".

Well, that's because you kill off a certain percentage of men every year, meaning that your odds of making it to 90 are poorer every year.  At age 90 100% of men make it to age 90, if they've lived that long.  It's a diminishing number every year.

With education, the fact that 87% of people graduate from high school means, quite frankly, that extraordinary steps have been taken to make that occur. Some of the steps are good, some of them are bad, some of them are mixed. The rate itself, 87%, is pretty good proof that we run people through high school who really don't have the capacity to graduate a rigorous educational system.

As noted above, Wyoming's schools are very good.  I was stunned, for example, when my daughter was in high school, and she came home and prepared for a test of Weimar Germany that was unbelievably advanced.  This speaks well of our system.  Also speaking well of it is that it offers advanced certificates for high school degrees, something it did not do when I graduated there in 1981.

And frankly, our community college system is excellent as well.  We have only one university (which is another topic) but its good as well.

Still, I think it can be maintained that compared to the mid 20th Century, certain things have dropped off as mandatory subjects.  I have around here somewhere a German novel that was my father's, from high school, and a Latin primer that was one of my uncle's (from a much different school system).  There was a time when learning languages was mandatory in high school , and learning a language broadens out the welatanshung considerably, n'est pas?

One thing that had very much occured is the rise of homeschooling.  People have done this for a long time, but it was almost freakishly uncommon in most areas and often due to remoteness.  Starting in the 90s, however, it really grew for a variety of reasons.

One is that in some areas people lived in bad school districts where there was little opportunity for a good primary education.  But another one is that, particularly amongst Protestant Evangelicals, and then spreading to Catholic Trads, who ironically sometimes hold very Protestant Evangelical societal views, that the education system was educating the young in vice and perversity.  Most recently this has seen its expression by inroads onto school boards by populists who use names like "Mom's For Liberty" for their organizations.

What often characterizes these organizations is a desire to prevent education in something.  It started off as early in the 1960s with an effort to prevent education on matters sexual.  Interestingly, when I was in high school, in spite of living in the least religious state in the US, and one that has always had a rough and transient population, community standards remained so high that what there was in the way of sex ed was pretty minimal.  I can recall that when I was in grade school we were supposed to watch films in 5th and 6th Grade, just as we were hitting our early teens. We watched one of them, but it conveyed so little information that it was truly harmless in the extreme, much less harmful than the information that was later distributed on the playground about what the next installment, which we never saw, was supposed to contain (which was, I'd note, biologically inaccurate).  The next time this came up was in junior high, and then again in high school biology class, in which we were required to tell our parents they could opt us out.  Nobody did.  I think we received a day of education, or not more than two, on the topic, which was biological and accurate.

Of course, I grew up in the 70s for the most part, and most of the kids in school with me were locals.  That might have made a big difference, as even the poor kids were from pretty stable families.  Divorce was incredibly rare.  A significant minority were from ranching families who were well aware of how biological processes worked (that Agrarian thing again) and therefore the knowledge wasn't shocking.  As for the impact, I can recall five girls that I knew to some extent getting pregnant in high school, and one of them was married.  One of the other ones was from a family where that ran through it like wildfire.  The graduating class was 500 or so students, so that's not a huge number.

It's not just sex ed that caused the boom in alternative learning, however.  By the 1970s evolution was an established scientific fact, even if still termed a theory, and it was taught in our schools outright.  The resistance to it being taught, at that time, didn't seem to exist, but it rebounded strongly later on in much of the country.  Overall, moreover, a decline in science teaching set in the U.S. during the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan, whose administration didn't support it.

Indeed, the Reagan administration was big on local control of things, and that has an impact here. As a Distributist, it might seem that this is one of the areas where we'd be big backers of that sort of thing, but in reality, the principal of subsidiarity advocates doing a thing at its most local effective, efficient, and just level.  As knowledge is literally global, it calls for large scale.  Physics and science are the same in Brooklyn as they are in Botswana.

A person might also note that our sometimes romantic attachment to Agrarianism recalls a day when less than 50% of males graduated from high school. That's quite true, but they also lived in an age in which many of them had been already well armed by their educations for the lives they would lead, so it was not accurate to suggest they were uneducated.  One of my grandfathers left school (a Christian Brothers school) at age 13, and yet ran a business successfully and could do calculus.  A major office building in this city is named after a man who was sent here in his early teens to open a branch of his father's pipeyard business and who went on to become a multimillionaire.

Additionally, if we go way back, we'll find that yeomanry, while they could be completely uneducated, could also be relatively well educated as well. Some were educated in basic matters through local churches, but often they were educated through community funded or subscribed schools.  John Adams, who started off life as a yeoman, was educated in that fashion, and his wife ran such a school (integrated, we might note) later on.

While on it, we might as well additionally note that the American South, at least since sometime prior to the Civil War, has been a real backwater of education, something that used to horrify northerners.  Little noticed, however, is that there's been a mini Great Migration of white Southerners out of their native region and into the rest of the country, where they've brought their views, including about education, with them.

And part of this is the byproduct of the 1960s.  Up until the 60s, while education was massively uneven in a country that has no central education system, there was a general consensus on what a person needed to learn in order to graduate from high school.  That can't really be claimed from region to region anymore.

So here, applying the principal of subsidiarity, the national government really needs to take a hand and set some basic standards, including learning the truth on scientific and historic matters.  And it needs to be rigorous.  If that depresses the graduation rate, so be it.

And there's really not a moment to lose.

Last prior:

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.