[Dr. Sivana]

#HowDidWeWinWorldWarII?

A bunch of young men with an eighth grade education but average to above average common sense mindful of their duties.

[2ndDivisionVet]

I think that’s about how much education my dad had at the time, if that. He’d had to work as a hired man since he was 11 to help feed his family.

[knarf]

With a real education which included a heavy emphasis on, “I’m the baddest ass on the planet Americanism”

[dsrtsage]

“A bunch of young men with an eighth grade education but average to above average common sense mindful of their duties.”

8th grade education in 1940 > Masters in anything in humanities today

[Stand Watch Listen]

I'm reminded of this Ronald Reagan Story:

From the memoirs of Reagan's wife, Nancy, the exchange took place in 1967, shortly after Reagan had been elected governor of California and had to deal with increasingly disruptive anti-war protests and student unrest on the campuses of state universities. As Dinesh D'Souza explained the context in his 1999 Reagan biography:

The president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr, symbolized the problem. By refusing to discipline student activists who were taking over buildings and obstructing classes, Kerr, in Reagan's view, had only encouraged further disruptions. The regents of the university system were displeased with Kerr, but he was lionized by the media, and they were afraid to take him on. As governor, Reagan was an ex officio member of the board of regents and at his first meeting on January 20, 1967, told them that if they wanted to fire Kerr, they had his full support; he would handle the political fallout. Kerr was ejected, to his own evident disbelief.

Then Reagan turned to the activists. Initially he tried to engage them in dialogue, but he soon found that they only wanted to trade barbs and insults. Reagan's quick-wittedness is apparent from records of some of those exchanges. At one campus meeting, a student told Reagan that it was impossible for people of Reagan's generation to understand young people. "You grew up in a different world," he said. "Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers."
Without missing a beat, Reagan replied, "You're right. It's true that we didn't have those things when we were young. We invented them."