“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.
One might expect, then, that the creation of a raft of new universities and schools focused on doing something different would seem like a fundamental necessity. After all, young people are deserting college in droves, with enrolments down by 15% over the past decade; in the lower grades, it’s common to hear talk of “zombie schools”, the product of more than 20% of pupils being “chronically absent”.
And yet, the emergence of these still-small shoots have terrified the educratic establishment. Some claim the shift in emphasis towards classics and civics, now occurring in places such as Florida’s New College, is “sinister development” by nefarious Right-wingers. Similarly, the teachers’ unions have resisted a number of moves to create charter schools — which increase choice in the public system — because they are part of a “war on schools”.
In some cases, the defence of failure is breathtaking. Blue states such as Illinois have worked to all but eliminate charters, even as the Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools where not one student can do grade-level math and 30 where none can do so in English. These schools are overwhelmingly in Chicago, where a significant increase in spending per student since 2019 seems to have made no impact.
Yet Chicago’s failures are wholly representative. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress found that only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, 20% in math, 22% in geography, and a mere 13% in US History. The Covid lockdowns may have accelerated the deterioration, but scores have continued to decline since the pandemic ended. IQ scores, which had been rising for decades, are now falling even among college students.
More influential here is education’s gradual radicalisation, which has its origins at the top of the food chain. Already in 2018, one study of 51 top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. Five years later, nearly three in five US professors admitted to self-censoring to avoid offending administrators and students.
The ideological stance of elite colleges is often justified with reference to their enlightened commitment to social justice. But in reality, the educational system has become more elitist and less connected to the rest of society. We are a long way from the massive expansion of higher education during the mid-20th century, largely through the GI Bill and later the National Defense Education Act, as well as post-war efforts to expand universities in the UK and across Europe.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: U.S. Army Photo by Staff Sgt. P. Behringer, via DVIDS in Public Domain.
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