The Gradest Generation: Do Boomers Pass Or Fail?

Baby boomers — which the Census Bureau defines as the group of 78 million or so people born between 1946 and 1964 — are obsessed with grades.

They rank everything: best to worst, least to most, zero to 100, A to F. They grade movies, hotels, beef, municipal bonds and restaurants — for the quality of food, for speed of service, for cleanliness. They mark up school essays and driving tests and citizenship exams. After the release of the 1979 movie 10, starring boomer Bo Derek, men and women began appraising each other on a 1-to-10 scale. The first Zagat survey also appeared in the late 1970s, featuring diners' ratings of cafes and restaurants. Entertainment Weekly, launched in 1990 by Time Inc. (sidebar), grades movies, books, TV shows, video games and other pop culture items on an A-to-F scale.

The latest example of baby boomers' drive to assign grades: the "data-driven movement" in U.S. education. As reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, this push to quantify — relying heavily on gadgets and computations for student improvement and systemwide accountability — is an outgrowth of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation.

"The high-tech strategy, which uses intensified assessments and the real-time collection of test scores, grades and other data to identify problems and speed up interventions," the Journal reports, "has just received a huge boost from President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan."

In other words, Obama (born in 1961) and Duncan (1964), like George W. Bush (1946) and many Americans of a certain age, just love grading systems. So let's take a moment to turn the tables and issue the baby boom generation its own cohort report card.......

"You mean that in January of 1973 the boomers that ranged in age from nine to twenty seven were running the nation and the Supreme Court??

Good point. And the answer is of course no. I overstretch when I rant. But I would say the influence of the 18-27 year old segment of the group was immense on the rest of the population. The retreat from Vietnam and legalized abortion were big causes for the baby boomer counter culture of the late 60's and early 70's. They somehow wielded great political power. Wish they hadn't.

I say nonsense to that claim. When Cronkite made his Tet Offensive speech the oldest boomers alive had just turned 22 and many of those were in Vietnam fighting.

When you look at the worst destruction, and especially when the fatal destruction of America was put in place (1965 immigration act for instance), it was legislated and decided by the courts mostly between roughly 1935 to 1975.

The worst damage by the American left actually started slowing as the boomers became old enough to start participating in American life from about the 80s on (1984 was the first time that all boomers could vote in a presidential election), that was when the American people started pushing back against the old politicians and establishment figures of the previous generations such as Ted Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Walter Cronkite, Allen Ginsberg, William Ayers, Jane Fonda and NOW and the teachers unions etc.

The truth is that it is almost impossible to even name prominent boomers from the sixties except for a few musicians, and not many of them and you sure don’t find them running media or government or elections or courts or anything else, when the 1960s were ending in December of 1969 the oldest boomer was all of 23 years old, she was the oldest woman of her generation and Sarah Palin was among the youngest boomers, being five years old.

What has happened is the media has convinced people that America wasn’t destroyed by greed and guilt and everything else that took place from 1935 to 1975 but was instead transformed over night by the public school kids of the 1960s, it is a very odd myth and I noticed that one of it’s creators (Tom Brokaw) and his friends in the media even recently created the description of a “Greatest Generation” which doesn’t actually emcompass a generation at all.

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