Well, the title of this post might involve some hyperbole, but I'm going to submit to you it's more true than we wish to believe.
Nothing good happens when children go to school. So, I recently had a conversation with a 19-year-old college freshman and her sister, who's a seventh grader, 14 years old. Both of these girls are at the top of their class, straight A students. I commented that I just purchased an Ethiopian Bible and I was really excited to dive into it because it's the oldest probably version of the Bible in the world, and neither of these girls knew where Ethiopia was. Interesting. The college freshman shared that she was struggling to decide on a major and she was getting some pressure about that. She'd always thought about medicine or nursing but was having second thoughts. So, I commented that yes, it's very hard for a woman to have a family and be a doctor or even a nurse. She replied that she wasn't sure she wanted to get married. She knew so many that had failed and the pain didn't seem to be worth the cost, the effort. I said that stable families were the foundation of any society.
Now, keep in mind that these are good Christian girls. We're not talking about the wild crazy only fans bunch here. We're talking about good schooled churched girls. I suggested that perhaps it'd be better to view those failures as lessons on how not to do it. We had a conversation and I asked her what the other girls in her classes were planning regarding families. She said they were taught to be careful not to get pregnant and to become successful before having children. Now think about that statement: to become successful before they have children. These women are being taught that success is a precursor to children. In other words, not choosing a great husband and being a wife and mother as the pinnacle of female success.
I asked how old she thought these girls would be before having children, and she seemed befuddled by the question. I pressed her for an answer, and she said, "Oh, maybe 35 or 40." I tried to explain that women delaying children until their mid-30s didn't work, and she was confused. That's when she asked my wife and me if women couldn't have kids at the age of 40. We explained that if a thousand women delayed having babies until they were 35 to 40, within four generations, those 1,000 women would be reduced to about 50 in the population. It wasn't simply straight-line mathematics.
You also have to factor in declining fertility rate trajectories and societal inertia. But if you're only having a couple of kids and women aren't even having that right now, the way that works is every society or every generation your number of females is reduced in half or more because they aren't even having two, and some societies aren't even having one. She didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about. Every thought she had was about the moment she lived in and how she felt today: school and church. Nobody's teaching these girls what's valuable to society and the unique roles they play as women, wives, and mothers. Everything is about programming them to be drones in a corporate industrial world.
Now, think about that conversation. Here is a brilliant 19-year-old woman, a 4.0 student throughout high school, who lacks basic knowledge of her own biology and fertility. I said, "Pull up an Excel spreadsheet and model it." Again, I was met with a vacant stare. I asked, "Don't you use Excel?" "No," she replied. Only Microsoft or Docs, meaning MS Word or Google Docs, word processors.
So again, as a college freshman and a STEM student, she has no knowledge of one of the most important tools of our age. What are they teaching these kids? Not what they need to know. Nothing in school is being taught about what's valuable. It's all being taught about how to destroy society. I then explained that the optimal ages for women to have children are between 15 and 22. That's math and biology. Her fertility is only 25% in her mid-20s and drops to around 10 to 12% by age 30, 5% by age 40. So by the age of 25, a woman has already lost 75% of the fertility she was born with. By age 40, chromosomal abnormalities reduce the percentage of genetically normal eggs to 20% of what she has left, implying that she only has about 1% of her original viable eggs. This is why the risk of genetic issues or miscarriages is one in three for 40-year-old women. And it's what drives the industry of suggesting women freeze their eggs when they're in their 20s so that they can choose to have babies without husbands, without families, later when they become desperate at the age of 46. At that point, I could tell she was mentally checking out of the conversation.
She didn't have the depth of intellect to deal with what I was explaining, and she'd lost interest. I know she's been avoiding me because she doesn't want to have these talks. We used to have such deep conversations, but now education seems to have driven the intelligence and curiosity out of these wonderful children.
Thoughts?
