Concerning the ongoing post-1960s decline in student achievement, Thomas Sowell (b. 1930 in my former home town of Gastonia, North Carolina), one of the greatest of all American economic and socio-cultural philosophers, commented, “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
BRILLIANT!
Sowell wasn’t talking about Baby Boomers. He was talking about the Johnnys and Joannes who began inhabiting America’s government schools in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is no coincidence that fifty years’ worth of American children who confuse thinking with feeling began their reign of terror around the same time American parents became persuaded that psychologists and other mental health types knew what they were talking about when it came to children and proper parent behavior.
