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tomward39

The expectations of youth

Children rise to the level of what’s expected of them.


Prior to the 1920s when adolescence was re-defined and expectations for children were lowered, there are quite a number of examples of young people excelling.


John Quincy Adams was eight while drilling with the MA minute men; at eleven he accompanied his father abroad as his secretary; at thirteen he traveled to Holland to attend Leiden University; at fourteen he was secretary and French interpreter for the American ambassador to Russia; at sixteen he was secretary to the Americans in France who were negotiating the peace treaty to end the Revolution.


When Benjamin Rush, father of American medicine, was fourteen he was graduating Princeton.


When Thomas Jefferson was nine he began his study of Latin, Greek and French; at sixteen he entered William and Mary College. (It was common for American youth to know at least three languages and enter college between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.)


By the time Nathan Hale was twenty-one, he had graduated college, became a teacher and subsequently quit to become a soldier fighting for the independence of the USA. Became a spy for that very same cause and uttered those immortal words, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

When Maria Mitchell was eleven she was a teaching assistant and studying astronomy; at twelve she helped calculate the exact time of a forthcoming solar eclipse; at seventeen she headed her own academy, training women in astronomy and science.


When John Marrant was thirteen he became the first black American to successfully evangelize Native Americans.


When Annie Oakley was nine she was already earning a living for her family with her shooting skills.


And the list goes on and on.


Sadly, people like John Dewey and Stanwood Cobb (people who ‘knew better’) vastly lowered the expectations for children in the 1920s.


Today we have 6% literacy rates in places like Detroit, 5% in Baltimore, 9% in Milwaukee and a national academic achievement rate of around 39%. Since 1979, the advent of the Dept. of Education, our ranking among the education programs of other countries has been constantly falling.


The good news is that these types of people are easier for a socialist regime to control.

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