General Discussion

Instead of at the start of your senior year in high school.

Personally, I a lot of my seniors that I watched graduate in June (teachers work graduation) were absolute numbskulls. Two were planning on buying a house and spent review time looking on sites like Zillow and Redfin, starting in the $400k range. They'd get jobs at a grocery store and apply for a mortgage forgiveness program that they heard about after 10 years. (!?!) In any event, the mortgage payments would be cheap and between the two of them they could afford it.

One raved on about how we wronged the USSR, where they had freedom of speech, public ownership meant everybody had a good job, and the country was prosperous and free. Hitler was wrong, of course. But the USSR was a great place to live. "And the prison camps?" They knew nothing about them. Or repressions. Or censorship. Or ... Most things. Unless TikTok said it, it wasn't real.

Years ago one said that the imperialist war in Vietnam had the highest US casualty rate of any war in history and the bloodiest. So said her history teacher. I had her stop what she was doing in *my* class to do a bit of research and she realized that it was way down on the list. Way, way down. "I can't believe my teacher lied to me." Yeah, well, believe it--he probably knew just what *his* professor lied to him about.