It all started, somewhat innocently, in a small log house in the early development of the country. This was the advent of the mass education system. Starting on the small scale, a schoolhouse would often only hold five to thirty students of all ages. By no means was this required, it was simply a responsible thing to do to earn more money to make a better life for yourself and your family at some big business. Then at some point, schooling became socialized. It was no longer a respectable thing to get an education, instead, big business had squeezed all of the profitability out of subsistence labor, and everyone had to be put into a pre-formed niche.

 

As you may have picked up on, the begining of all of the country's problems was the advent of compulsory mass education mixed with the dominance of big business. This has a minor crime side effect that was originally thought to be due to bad parenting. Originally, parents were couped up in close quarters with their children. They had nothing better to do than to get to know them, and the children had no choice but to cooperate and make a strong enough bond in order to make things easy for everyone. Often in larger families, one or more children is able to escape the bonding rituals and always be a rebel, but that's another story. All of this bonding and connecting made for a very efficient family, and it was well needed. This was because there were no televisions, no computers, no cell phones, only hard work to look forward to. Then, big business stepped in, and it all changed.

 

Big business is the driving force in economy, education, consumerism, technology, medicine, agriculture, and any other industry. These are the people who can afford to pay more people to do less work, and sell products for less. The secret to their sucess is a mixture of many things, including low wage labor, complex machines doing the work of a thousand employees, and the ability to work around the clock. The downside to big business is that everything becomes more specialized. In order to work there, you must have training, and you must often have a lot of complex training that only an expert can provide. With these expectations, and by making education expensive, big business effectively closed the loop, making it impossible for for people outside the economic circle to get in. They squeezed the subsistence laborers until they could no longer support themselves, making it impossible to get an education, and often causing suicides and putting children on the streets.

 

The people who successfully got into the big business loop also paid a high social price. They must work away from the home for an extensive amount of time. This time is rightfully called the productive hours of the day. In the old family, the productive hours of the day were spent on social bonding tasks, such as family farming, family harvesting, family picnics, going to events such as church or parties, and playing teamwork skill building games. The basic principles of responsibility were practiced in the home, with very real concequences, and real rewards. In the new family, the parents are at work for long hours. They work as long as possible in order to get the most expensive consumer products from the biggest businesses. During the first few generations, they held on to their sense of responsibility in their children, remembering  to save money to get them educated. However, they had no time to teach their children how to be responsible. There were no wholesome parent-child activities that stimulated teamwork skills. Children rarely had the opportunity to practice responsibility, with real concequences and real rewards.

 

Suddenly, it became obvious to everyone that children were lacking something. They simply didn't have what it takes to be a good employee or employer. They wanted to party with their friends all day, and use illegal substances. They would turn to a life of crime to get what they wanted. Their parents were nowhere to be found, and when they were home, they could be found around the television set, or sitting in their favorite chair, eating or drinking. Social skills had degraded so much that parents were no longer able to have a nice conversation with their kids. With such inept parents, it is no wonder that the children were unable to keep a polite tone with them. This created the age gaps, with everyone from each age group only understanding and identifying with others from their own group. Although, when researched, these groups were found to be fundamentally alike, with only minor social translation issues. This is not to say that everyone was this way, some families had refused to work inside the box, and had raised their children.

 

Then came the age of delinquency, disease, and social tension. Parents were willfully ignoring their kids because the school system was taking care of them all day. Sick children were rarely helped before the point of no return. As a natural coping mechanism, a huge populous of health-centric people developed in society. These people decided that the only way to stop this downward spiral was by using another massive institution, big government. Of course, they had no idea what the root cause was, they simply were trying to get rid of the symptoms in the quickest way possible. This quick way was to mandate that every have certain entitlements that have been shown to combat the symptoms, and people who refused would be punished according to the law. This failed many times in the past, and was also met with strong opposition because many families had reverted to the old ways and had no need for the blanket bandaid policies pushed on them by the government.

 

Now that you know the general history of the problem, there are many solutions that may be applied in order to solve the real underlying root of the problem. The first thing that must be done in order to combat the social degradation that started in the home is to re-integrate the family. This is being done by use of technology, and may occur naturally in good time. People are staying home, and communicating with work by internet. Children are also staying home, sometimes through homeschooling, sometimes through a new technology called cyber school. This was first developed with higher learning, but it is so useful and relatively low cost that it is trickling down even to elementary school.

 

Another aspect of recovery must also be addressed. Just as the traditions of the old family stuck in the hearts and minds of the earlier generations long after the constructs of the old family were destroyed, so too will the ways of the new family stick in the minds of people as they transition back to what is healthier. The rules of the close family will have to be re-written, and the new social laws that are in place must be followed. Easy ways of punishment such as spanking are now shown by many studies to cause many bad psychological side-effects. Some are even classified as forms of torture, illegal for use even for enemy combatants. Even though some may consider the difficulties of such a proposition to be great, the benefits far outweigh the challenges by every scale known to humanity.