It’s been 50 years since liberal baby boomers radically changed our country forever. Many of our current societal ills can be traced back to the 60s, and as we continue to see today, liberals took actual issues and “solved” them… only the solution was worse than the problem. Education is a prime example. Liberal activists took over academia and instead of improving education, they set about working on indoctrination. We once had the brightest minds in the world — now, our students fall more behind each year. So if you’re wondering how we got to this political precipice, where we are forced to confront the reality of our next president being either a criminal, a con man, or a communist, all you have to do is look at higher education. M.G. Oprea at the Federalist writes:

[O]ther sources agree that recent college graduates are alarmingly ignorant about civics and U.S. history. In a survey done by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), 40 percent of recent grads were unaware that Congress has the right to declare war and 10 percent think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court. This begs for a closer look at what U.S. colleges are teaching the millennial generation.

In most American universities, students are required to take some core classes. Traditionally, these were courses in U.S. and European history, literature, language, economics, and math. It was assumed that these were the necessary building blocks to create not just a sound intellect but also an informed citizen. However, progressives challenged and changed this way of thinking mid-way through the last century.

Academics in the 1960s identified what was perhaps a legitimate problem in university education. Too few courses discussed minorities, non-Western histories, or alternative analyses of our own history. But as often happens when progressives begin trying to right a perceived wrong, they went too far.

Rather than merely having these courses available as electives or requirements alongside the core requirements of U.S. and European history, such classes have now taken their place. In part this is because classes in Western Civilization are considered to be oppressive and patriarchal. So, while a few schools still require courses in Western heritage (like my alma mater Hillsdale College), most treat them as electives. In fact, only 18 percent of 1,100 universities ACTA surveyed required a foundational course in U.S. government or history.

The new status quo is that students must take a set number of courses in different subjects, but the selection of courses to fulfill those requirements is broad and uneven. Take for example, Ohio State University, which has the third-highest undergraduate enrollment in the country. Students in the College of Arts and Science must take one history course. Their choices range from foundational courses like “Western Civilization, 17th Century to the Present,” to courses like “The Sixties,” “Love in the Modern World,” “History of Medicine in Film,” or “Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.”

… It isn’t just the course’s subject matter that’s the problem. It’s the absolute intolerance for dissent against academic dogma. Witness a student at UC-Santa Barbara who recently wrote an op-ed about the political indoctrination occurring in the department of women’s studies. He took a class in which gender as a social construct and male privilege were taken as fact. Disagreement was not allowed nor were any alternative points of view discussed. One fellow student reacted to his article on Facebook by saying she wanted to “stab” him.

In short, students are learning how to interpret the world through a political lens. They aren’t learning actual history from which they can draw their own conclusions and interpret the present.

How can we possibly hope younger generations will be able to manage the country if they don’t know where it’s been? They may know something about 1960s social movements, but in what context? How will they understand the civil rights era if they don’t even know anything about the war that began the long road to equal rights for blacks in America?

… Nor do these young people know much about the socialist political ideology that they are supporting. They’ve never learned about the dangers of authoritarian rule, the Cold War, or the horrors of communism. They walk around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts saying they’re warriors for social justice, completely oblivious to the real history of Guevara’s involvement in Cuba with Fidel Castro.

As Peggy Noonan recently pointed out, today’s youth aren’t old enough to remember socialism for themselves, unlike older generations who are less enthused about Sanders. Instead they’re learning about it through the filter of progressive academia. Sanders is essentially feeding back to them exactly what they learned in college: the evils of American capitalism, social injustice, Keynesian economics, and all the rest. So naturally they find him and his talk of radical change appealing.

Oh, sure, millennials are the easy target here. But millennials alone won’t elect any president (the youth vote never means much), and they’re hardly the first generation to be indoctrinated with the radical politics of aging liberal baby boomer activists. We’re at this point because Americans have been dumbed down, for generation after generation. (Even the screenwriter of “Idiocracy” has noticed, saying that the film has new become a documentary.) People don’t understand our government or how it works. They don’t know much about the Founding Fathers anymore. They don’t understand the intricacies of the Civil War. They don’t know which party is responsible for what, let alone understand what the repercussions are. Instead, they know all about how #YesAllMen rape women, or how police officers victimize black people just for funsies. They know about how universal health care is awesome in every country that has instituted it because people don’t ever go without health care (try not to laugh). They know about how we somehow created Islamic terrorism.

In short, we have generations of Americans that haven’t been educated — they’ve been indoctrinated.

There’s a lot of talk about how we can turn our country around, but very little talk about the role education (or rather, the lack thereof) has played in its decline. But the fact of the matter is, until we take back education, nothing is going to get better.