The educated opinion of the new generation became active resistance and the people who were profiting from the war, afraid that their money and power would be diminished, were able to convince the state apparatus in the United States as well in the countries of Europe where unrest had also erupted, to hit back hard and suppress the unrest. To a certain degree it worked. Of course some elements of resistance survived longer than the mass movements, and some of these resisters became violent, which allowed the state apparatus to point a scolding finger and say: "You see! They are at heart bad people!"
The end result, in the policies of most of the states where this educated generation showed its resistance to the powers that be, was that the education infrastructure has been slowly but surely dismantled, allowed to petrify and decay until today, in many of these states, education has become a commodity for which you must pay a high, sometimes completely unaffordable price. This in turn has produced a visceral fear in the third and now the fourth post-war generation that their expensive education will be more of a burden than a boon, especially if they don't kowtow to the owners who have monopolized the system and do their bidding.
Germany, however, has not succumbed completely to this trend. Yes, there are now many private institutes of learning, and some of them are very expensive, but if you pass your Abitur and are accepted for higher education, you pay nothing to go to university. Let me repeat that: you pay nothing to go to university. What does that tell you? It tells me this is an explicit recognition of the fact that the human element is an important part of the economic and social infrastructure of the nation. But this is not just evident at the level of higher education. The vocational education sector in Germany is vibrant and thriving. Kids who don't have the smarts or the will to go in for a university education can become plumbers, carpenters, turners, welders, bricklayers, enter any number of vocational professions which, in the end, often pay more than jobs you might get after 4 or 6 years in academia. A typical apprenticeship for a plumber or mechanic is 3 years, then 2 years as a journeyman, and finally an opportunity to become a master. Joining a Guild is also in the books, and the guilds still determine standards of quality, so that if you hire a Master Carpenter, you can be assured that he or (today in-ever growing numbers) she will deliver an accepted standard quality of work.
I'm not going to make this a dissertation. So I would like to conclude with the observation that the neglect and decay of human infrastructure today is leading us inevitably back toward a pre-industrial age in which the most neglected humans in society are indiscriminately enslaved and killed off for no other reason than it is cheaper to use them up in a way that makes money for the people in power -- war and other criminal activities -- than to help them attain a level of education which could possibly threaten the stability of the pyramid by bringing true democracy back as a social movement for the good of the many instead of it being a smokescreen -- as it is today -- which is being misused for the profit of the very few.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
