People were incredibly ignorant when I grew up Washington and California from around 1950 until 1970

Why was this true?

It's mostly that people hadn't graduated from High School let alone college. It's true, however, that the GI bill after World War II changed all these things. For example, my father in law who passed away in 2008 had already graduated Stanford University then went into the Navy as an Ensign and after the war went to Harvard and got a Master's degree in Business from Harvard. 

So, not everyone was ignorant just most people. Because of this ignorance people often could get violent very easily and I saw this a lot in the 1950s whether they were children or adults. I saw a lot of blood growing up especially in Glendale. Luckily, I was big for my age and MOST of the time my life wasn't threatened but sometimes it was. So, staying alive through all of that was sort of scary for me and everyone I knew growing up.

But, the main cause of ignorance I can show you right now just by illustrating what it was like to be a child then.

First of all, no internet to do research with if you were a child who could read.

I was always very intelligent and interested in anything new or different growing up in California. But, if I didn't know something there wasn't even VHS Tapes to go find to watch things on until the early 1980s when I was 32 or older. So, if my parents or grandmother didn't know something I could call my friends on the phone and if they or their parents didn't know I could ride my bicycle several miles to the library and if they didn't know something or couldn't direct me to where I could find something then I wasn't going to find out about that possibly ever in my life.

So, this tended to breed ignorance in people who often didn't finish high school (or even start it) and so many people only had been to grade school or Junior high school and were lucky if they did that that I met growing up.

So, they tended to be unbelievably ignorant and naive about all sorts of things.

For example, the average child knows more about sex now at 4 to 6 years old than most girls 12 to 20 years old did then in the 1950s which is why the main reason people needed to get married was Date Rape in the 1950s and 1960s (at least until the birth control pill was legal in 1960. Then women's lives radically started changing at this point and haven't stopped changing yet.