Adulting 101? Seriously?

So here we are.

No this is not a joke or a story produced by The Onion or The Babylon Bee.

The Greatest Generation have now produced grandchildren so inept that universities are launching “adulting” classes. This is what you get when government attempts to do the right thing. Generations of people who can't read, write intelligent sentences, or think critically.

The Daily Mail reports that Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada has launched 'Adulting 101' for “students who can't perform the most basic life tasks like changing a tire, buying groceries or doing laundry.” (See below)

This news was preceded by a New York Post story that the preeminent university in all the land, Harvard, has launched a new remedial math course. Called Math MA it is one year long, meets five days a week compared with the regular two days, and likely doesn't carry any graduation credits. Remedial math at Harvard.

Is anyone surprised? I'm not the least bit surprised by any of this. Seriously.

Our children, a daughter and a son, are now in their thirties. During their years at home in a traditional, Western, nuclear family, they were taught basic, common sense tasks such as doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, wiping after going to the bathroom, bed-making, basic carpentry and home repairs, and simple automotive repairs and servicing. Both kids rolled their eyes at doing some of these things. My greatest failure in this endeavor was my inability to teach our daughter how to drive a standard transmission car. I had taught my wife, and I taught my son. One failure I have to accept. I'll teach my daughter's daughter!

But, that failure is but a shadow in my wife's and my efforts to give our offspring basic life skills. Overall we succeeded.

And this was no better demonstrated to me, and starkly so the failures of the generation in which they were raised in, than one Autumn 2006 day when we received a phone call from our daughter. She was then in her freshman year at college.

A home football game was played the night before. That meant the vast majority of people on campus were at the stadium which cleared the way for a group of local teenagers to stroll through campus slashing the tires of over three dozen cars. Our daughter's car was one of those cars. She called home to see if I had a lead on an honest tire merchant in the small town where the college is located. I did, and she got a good deal on a new tire.

Happily, though, through my efforts at basic, common sense instruction, she pulled out her car jack and lug wrench and changed the damaged tire on her car with the spare. She then found herself doing the same for three classmate boys who were clueless in changing a tire. THAT was nineteen years ago. And while they may have been eighteen, they were still boys. A man knows how to change a tire.

But, how could I have possibly seen the harbinger of things to come back then. Now these universities and colleges are making money by charging for “adulting” classes. But perhaps I should have. I went back to college during the time my daughter was at hers. I went to Limestone College, a venerable liberal arts school founded in 1848, at a branch campus they had opened near our home. One of the required courses was a one-credit-hour class on – and I kid you not – the course catalog. THE COURSE CATALOG! Limestone was the fourth school of higher learning that I had attended. (Yes, it took me 31 years to get my bachelors degree).

I questioned the requirement and was told that it was now required by the accreditation authorities. I threw up my hands and passed the course with a 4.0. Sadly, Limestone College closed the doors a month ago after 177 years. Maybe the course catalog had a role.

The United States for years had the finest education system in the world. It is now dead last among modern, industrialized nations. It's frightening to believe that it's happening in Canada, too.

The great Thomas Sowell has been speaking and warning of the consequences of the things happening in the education, social, and government systems for the past 40 years. The real question today is how do we fix it? The 'radicalism' of the fix is likely more than the populace believes it can bear. I'm hopeful, but realistic. I'm frightened for the US, the West, and the planet as a whole.

And I can't really come up with a decent ending or summation for this particular blog entry. Make one up of your own.

 

Additional reading:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14754261/university-launches-adulting-101-course-teach-basic-life-skills-canada.html

https://nypost.com/2025/04/05/opinion/harvard-univ-the-ivy-league-teaching-remedial-math/

History Unfolding

This is not mine, but a confirmation of exactly what I have been saying fort the past five years by a man much more educated and scholarly than I. It was forwarded by a good friend, and it speaks volumes to anyone out there willing to read and listen. This isn't me talking; this is a man with a Doctorate in History from Harvard, and has taught there and at Carnegie Mellon. Those are credentials EVERY liberal loves! RGB

History Unfolding

I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books on history that have been published in six languages, and I have studied history all my life. I have come to think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is simply a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus.

Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about ten to fifteen years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two.

We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why? We learned just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has "loaned" two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the $700 billion we all argued about so strenuously just this past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of "we the people," who loaned our powers to our elected leaders. Apparently not.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy... Why?

We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving. Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate. Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity. Why?

We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (violently in California over a proposition that is so controversial that it simply wants marriage to remain defined as between one man and one woman. Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?) We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic. To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is Medicare and our entire government. Our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and I know precisely what I am talking about) - the list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth. It is potentially 1929 x ten...And we are at war with an enemy we cannot even name for fear of offending people of the same religion, who, in turn, cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And finally, we have elected a man that no one really knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla , Alaska. All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders? No? Oh, of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe are more important.)

Mr. Obama's winning platform can be boiled down to one word: Change.. Why?
I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.
This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure. Change is indeed coming. And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again.

And that is only the beginning!

As a serious student of history, I thought I would never come to experience what the ordinary, moral German must have felt in the mid-1930s In those times, the "savior" was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing. What they should have known was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory. Conservative "losers" read it right now.

And there were the promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and frowned and waved a lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his "brown shirts" would bully and beat them into submission. Which they did - regularly (Much like Obama's SEIU thugs are doing today, RGB). And then, he was duly elected to office, while a full-throttled economic crisis bloomed at hand - the Great Depression. Slowly, but surely he seized the controls of government power, person by person, department by department, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The children of German citizens were at first, encouraged to join a Youth Movement in his name where they were taught exactly what to think. Later, they were required to do so. No Jews of course.

How did he get people on his side? He did it by promising jobs to the jobless, money to the money-less, and rewards for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe , and across the world. He did it with a compliant media - did you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and ........ change. And the people surely got what they voted for.

If you think I am exaggerating, look it up. It's all there in the history books.

So read your history books. Many people of conscience objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and ridiculed. When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though. And the world came to regret that he was not listened to.

Do not forget that Germany was the most educated, the most cultured country in Europe . It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities. And yet, in less than six years (a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency) it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors. All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.

As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is transpiring around me.

I choose to believe the evidence. No doubt some people will scoff at me, others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. To some degree, perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe-and why I believe it.

I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. Perhaps the only hope is our vote in the next elections.

David Kaiser
Jamestown , Rhode Island

David Kaiser is a respected historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European Warfare to American League Baseball. Born in 1947, the son of a diplomat, Kaiser spent his childhood in three capital cities: Washington D.C., Albany , New York , and Dakar, Senegal. He attended Harvard University, graduating there in 1969 with a B.A. in history. He then spent several years more at Harvard, gaining a PhD in history, which he obtained in 1976. He served in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976.

He is a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States Naval War College. He has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College and Harvard University. Kaiser's latest book, The Road to Dallas, about the Kennedy assassination, was just published by Harvard University Press.