Rural and Old

An interesting aspect of my McNally Smith College of Music experience was the fact that a small city, St. Paul, attracted an outsized population of rural students. I don’t think I ever heard any statistics from our marketing/recruitment department, but I would be surprised if more than 10% of our student body came from cities of more than 10,000 people. Unfortunately, the school’s recruiters went hard after a fair number of inner city victims/students and while their tastes were at least 21st Century they mostly couldn’t afford either the “education” or the business. The music business has long passed the moment when ordinary people can hope to earn a living either as a musician or a technician.

The point I’m hoping to make here, though, is that rural people fairly consistently live in the past; often a fantastic non-existent past. The kids who came into that music school were almost universally 1960-1980 music fans, what should have been their parents’ or grandparents’ music genre. Weirdly, they are not even aware of how strange that is.

Having retired to a rural small town, I’ve discovered that people from my own generation in this area are fans of their parents’ or grandparents’ music genres; mostly really old country music or 1940s and 50s pop crap like Frank Sinatra or worse. Weirdly, they are [also] not even aware of how strange that is. [Remember, retiring to some place is exactly the same as picking a place to die. Nobody with a lick of sense in my age group expects to see the next decade and that makes for very short term planning.]  I have never been around so many people my age who know almost nothing about 1960s pop music. When they play a popular song from their own youth, they play it like it is an act of either defiance or extreme hipness. There is nothing hip about 60-year-old music. I often feel like I’m surrounded by reincarnations of my parents’ generation.

When liberal politicians talk about closing the gap between rural and urban voters, they are either dreaming or have a plan to dumb-down urban voters. Part of the attraction to rural areas is the lack of competition, low tech job demands, and a “more simple life” (read dumber and lazier). It is, literally, impossible to make silk purses out of sows’ ears and you can’t invent an education system that will thwart the low standards, superstitions, and fears of rural parents. In the 1950s and early 60s, the federal government made a strong push toward encouraging teachers to go to less desirable communities; rural and poor urban areas. The result was improved test scores, more of those kids finding their way into higher education and professions, but the push-back was fierce. A surprising number of parents do not want their kids to live better lives than their own and a high percentage of those parents are rural.

Today, we’re going the opposite direction. Rural and red state education has become an oxymoron as teachers abandon rural schools and many are closing or shortening their hours. “Teaching to the test” has been the state of K-12 “education” since Bush II’s “No Child’s Behind Left Unmolested” and the tests are getting dumbed-down every year. The complaint that “Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level” does not include the fact that the 8th grade level reference point has been slipping for 40 years. The average American reads at the lowered 7th to 8th grade level, which means they might be able to read a “young adults” book if they really concentrated. These are Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” A pitiful 12% of Americans are “proficient” readers; meaning people who could be useful employees or even business owners and professionals. This is the “demanding” criteria for “proficient”: “Click to the second page of search results from a library website to identify the author of a book called Ecomyth.” The top category, Level 5 and the most literate 2% are able to “Identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.” Holy crap! We’re toast.

Keep in mind, these are the people, the lower 88% for whom Republican politicians are making their MAGA pitch. They couldn’t make a 1st grade classroom great, or even slightly more intelligent, if their lives depended on it. When you read for the bottom, you don’t have to work very hard to accomplish your goals.