Crisis Update - The Kidnapping Of Mind, Body & Soul

Viral videos expose youthful knowledge gap and lack of practical skills

Event Covid exposed how schools are a vector to inject a centrally-mandated agenda.
Multiple trends point to federal control and creation of a culture of dependency.
Focus on gender, personal safety and segregation drive social distancing and isolation.

Covid agenda in U.S. schools cost $190 billion, dwarfing Common Core.
Education’s supporters and detractors miss outcomes that suit corporate owners.
Youth contend with a lack of practical and social skills; sabotaged by design.

Despite claims to teach critical thinking we hear more about Critical Race Theory.
Schools alone can’t be blamed for leading youth to a cognitive and practical dead end.
Corporations set the curriculum, shape government policy — they want your baby.

Related article Moneycircus, Aug 2021 — Spies, Dupes and Charities: Rivals for Power, Part 4. Norman Dodd and the tax-exempt foundations

(2,200 words or about 11 minutes’ read.)

Swallows and Amazons (1974) after Arthur Ransome’s novel of 1930 was a picture of self-reliance and survival.

Jun 27, 2022

A new cottage industry has emerged on YouTube where college-aged Americans pepper their cohort with questions that should not bother an elementary schoolgoer.

For example: on what continent do we stand, which countries are to the north and south, and is Africa a state. They’re stumped and the videos are viral. [1]

Maybe we’ve been pranked but, sadly, they seem too unreal to be fake. Or to quote Elon Musk: “You can tell it’s real because it looks so fake.”

Only part of this can be laid at the threshold of schools. The vloggers are asking informational questions of a generation raised to Google. A problem more serious than factual knowledge is the lack of practical skills, and a timely one would be growing food and knowing what to eat.

One sometimes hears that parents of an older generation, motivated to give their children a better life, sheltered them from the experience of the Great Depression or the world wars, and yet they failed, inadvertently, to pass on what they had learned at great personal endeavour.

The failure to gain self-reliance, otherwise called the culture of dependency, has many roots. Corporations have caused it by accident or, as my brother used to say as a child, “by iliberate” — the medical industry is the posterboy — yet even the friendly supermarket that does so much for our dopamine, schools us like fish.

Corporations have owners, the richest of whom fund foundations to shape society — Britain’s Sainsbury family, grocery billioinaires, sits on the board of the UK’s Institute for Government, which has financed the behavioural management venture MINDSPACE, that was used to inculcate fear in the population during Event Covid.

This is not to say corporations are evil — though they are psychopathic. [2]

It is remarkable that those in power work so hard to manipulate our ideas when all you need to change the lives of people is to disrupt them.

This suggests that rival groups are competing to direct the public mind — which is more likely than one all-knowing world power, though Event Covid has offered much evidence that governments are indeed being coordinated in lock step.

Rationing sense

It is remarkable how quickly knowledge is lost. It is not that a people become stupid, rather that information held in common can fade so soon.

The error is to think that good times last forever. The post-war economic expansion of lifetime employment, pensions and social security turned out to be temporary. Was it, as the author John Lanchester suggests in Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay (2010) simply a strategy to oppose two camps in the Cold War? Corporate pensions were already being phased out in the 1980s in favour of inadequate personal schemes. The golden age by that stage had lasted only 40 years.

In much of Europe, WW2 destroyed nutrition, especially in crowded Britain. Apart from rationing it saw the introduction of synthetic products to replace natural ones. The food writer Elizabeth David described it in some of her articles, published as a selection in An Omlette and a Glass of Wine (1984). She had spent the war in Alexandria working in the naval cipher office. When she returned to London and saw what they ate, she was horrified.

Rationing lasted until 1954. A whole generation had lost touch with traditional ingredients and cookery. It is probably only if you find yourself, like David, in another culture and are forced to acquaint yourself with different ingredients that cooking becomes once again a survival skill rather than a reflexive reach for convenience.

Marguerite Patten was a food economist for the Ministry of Food in WW2 who invented recipes from the meagreness of rationing. After the war she, like David, did her best to bring back real food. As a child I leafed through my mother’s favourite book, Cookery In Colour, published in 1961.

Nowadays television shows tell you how to boil an egg: partly tongue-in-cheek for sure, yet video guides from The Home Depot instruct youngsters in the use of a tape measure. [3]

In Tbilisi, where these words are being typed, a German who invested in a kiwi fruit farm ended up making educational videos on the side. He had to make a visual guide for each agricultural skill that he needed on the farm. Even though the employees live in the fertile Caucasus countryside — in a country that dates from the Paleolithic age, possibly hundreds of thousands of years old — they lacked knowledge of how to care for trees, how to pick fruit or crate it without damage.

Both grandfathers were keen gardeners — from banks of flowers to rows of vegetables. It wasn't even a matter of hobby, it was part of life. Some of that know-how filtered down through my own father and mother and yet I can testify that it’s not the knowing; it’s the doing that counts.

At the back of my late father’s house there’s a man in his nineties who has lived alone all his life, and who on less than an acre feeds himself almost exclusively from his own produce.