I was all on board with the essay until I got to this one line that, frankly, made me really mad. "I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem." This ABSOLUTELY is a K-12 eduction problem! I have 3 kids in K-12 right now. I recently pulled them out of public school (one of the "best in the country" Fairfax County, VA--what a joke) and we now pay a lot of money for private school, so they can have the kind of quality education I had in public school in the 90s. I can agree most individual teachers are doing the best they can, but the current system is entirely rotten. Kids are pushed into technology (computers, iPads) as early as kindergarten. They are not required to read entire books, let alone write about them. They don't take spelling tests or memorize their math facts. This is all done because the ideology now is that our foremost concern should be "mental health." Talk about your feelings a lot. Lots of breaks. Don't fail anyone, or discipline anyone, or make anyone feel bad. This is also because the peripheral education industry is always pushing the next new tool/course/etc. so we think if we just make the material newer/more fun/etc. that will fix it. Now that they are in Catholic school, my kids read a lot of books, memorize their math facts, and take weekly spelling (and other) tests. Phones are not permitted in class. Sometimes my kid gets an F--and he deserves if for not studying enough. They also talk a lot about service and what they can do for the wider society--versus identifying their victimhood and bemoaning what society should be doing for them. We MUST identify the problem if we are ever to reverse coarse. Our K-12 public education system is the problem.
It's reasonable not to blame K-12 teachers but you should consider blaming the K-12 "thought leadership" that thoroughly gutted any respect for the humanities over the last generation. It seems many kids can get through their entire HS education without ever needing to read a full book cover to cover, let alone a full Shakespearean play. A lot of this was done in the name of chasing STEM which is fine in and of itself (assuming it has even worked to broadly improve STEM aptitude - has it?) but not at the expense of developing a shared cultural appreciation for arts, letters and beauty.
No Ray it is not about Stem vs Liberal Arts. it about honesty. Telling children in second grade that they failed their spelling test. And when they did not pass arithmetic in third grade that they would have to go to summer school. And in fifth grade banning them from school sponsored extracurricular activities until they understood the basics. And then later, teaching them that their failures were the result of victimhood of this that or the other form of societal oppression. Western Civilization is finished, not because of its greatness, but because it allowed its greatness to be socialized.
As the other commenter here has said, that same “thought leadership” simultaneously destroyed all rigor and standards in education (including and maybe especially in math), with a further sprinkling of idiotic ideas such as that kids should learn to read by recognizing whole words rather than learning to sound them out. The abysmal test scores tell us everything we need to know about how incompetent and destructive the educational regime has been.
I've been promoting hands-on learning and career-technical education for several decades now, not because it's for dummies -- not at all, but because it keeps kids engaged (producing much higher HS grad rates) and, to this author's point, IT CAN'T BE FAKED. You either get that engine running or you don't. You learn OHM's law because you need that knowledge to get the electrical system to work. Ditto for the math you need to complete a carpentry project. Or for coding software, etc.
This post makes me think that the advantages of career-technical curricula are more than practical, they are intellectual, forcing disciplined habits of the mind. AI can't fake that. Oh, and the kid who gains confidence in fixing an engine, gains confidence as a learner in other spheres as well, learning how to pursue questions in order to understand and address a problem. Even when, as in the humanities, there may be no hard-and-fast answer to a question, the habits of learning fostered by math and mechanics can help to overcome the bull-shitting tendencies that are all too common among the students the author describes.
Uggh. This is so freaking depressing, even if I already know. I notice the diminishment in a different sphere: I've practiced law for almost 30 years, and the kids today . . . not as good, and it's scary. New lawyers routinely come in with a bare rudimentary knowledge of evidence. Are we doomed? Phone addiction is definitely a huge factor.
I recently saw a video of Tucker talking to a retired surgeon who said the field of surgery has been dumbed down so much that you can no longer assume young surgeons are competent. Is there any area of our society that hasn’t been dumbed down for the sake of equity?
Yes, we’re doomed. Look at Trump’s kids. Morons all, Jared Kashner? And they went to good schools. I’ve taught, briefly, some of the Students the author describes and they are that bad and worse.
Would we have been better off if the democrats had won the election and Kamala was in charge? “Seeking asylum” is in effect open borders since it overwhelms “due process.” Democrats say all migrants, not only gang members, must have due process but there is no way we can give due process to 12 million migrants who came here during Biden’s term. This then is a deadlocked and impossible situation. I voted for Trump 3 times but now agree that he’s a disaster but would the democrats have been any better? Both sides seem intent on destroying the country although I still prefer the republicans since at least they want borders, meritocracy and don’t consider me racist white trash for being white, working class and conservative.
You are so right. mean, who could have INAGINED Trump was going to do what he is doing? Shocked, I tell you.
And I think both parties represent the Inebriati. The Knights Tippler. Obviously they are intentionally, intentionally and deliberately devoted to DESTROYING THE COUNTRY!!!
All part of a vast secret plan. I, as a semi-anonymous internet commenter, have far better plans!
There are several things that have led to this. One is the K-12 system and its relationship with the testing industry. Another is deeper. When I was young, pretty much the only way to experience a story on your own was through a book. I wanted stories, so I read and read. Now, people get that need met through many media so they are not strong readers and writers. Are there other ways to cultivate the deep thinking, the life of the mind, and achieve the cultural transmission of higher ed in addition to reading and writing, or even as a complement to it?
Your observations are spot on! I'm also a tenured Gen X professor with 30+ years experience at a variety of institutions from R1-R3 (currently at an R2 institution).
tl;dr Follow the incentives...
The $1m question is the root cause I guess. I see others wanting to blame the K-12 system (or cell phones), while you see a broader societal role. I personally think the root cause was a major shift in the incentive structure for professors (and teachers).
I'm just old enough to remember college before teaching evaluations. In those days, students were seen as products to be molded not customers. The top grades were reserved for the very best performers and the average grade was a C at my institution. Grades reflected your ability to meet a standard of excellence. An A meant the student had thoroughly mastered the subject matter (and even gone beyond). Of course, some professors used the same notes for 30 years and some were horrible teachers.
Enter student evaluations, that were originally pitched as ways to identify weaknesses and provide paths for self-improvement. That lasted about one semester, when student ratings started to be used for tenure and promotion decisions. Today in my state, a teacher that does not meet expectations in teaching can theoretically be fired from tenure in two years. Contingent faculty without tenure with poor teaching evaluations will often not get invited back after just one semester of teaching. These practices create HIGH POWERED INCENTIVES to make students happy. (Note, these are essentially customer satisfaction scores - 'did you like this course' rather than 'did you learn something in this course'). Raises are also often tied to 'teaching effectiveness'.
Professors have reacted by dumbing down courses and inflating grades. High grades for little or no work make students happy. It also makes administrators happy as students that pass their courses stay enrolled, pay more tuition and fees, and might even graduate on time (which helps rankings). Parents are also happy that little Joey or Jenny graduates with a high GPA that will set them up for grad school or a cushy job. It's a win-win-win right? Of course, society (or taxpayers) are the big losers as they heavily subsidize higher education but get inferior (or declining) performance in return. A basic undergraduate degree is not a ticket to the good life anymore.
K-12 has a similar incentive problem. No child left behind had the noble goal of making sure every student met a common national standard for reading, science, and math. It did this by creating HIGH POWERED SANCTIONS for schools. If you didn't meet the standard for each sub-group of students your school might be closed, your principal fired, etc. The inevitable happened. Teachers started teaching strictly to the test, and states lobbied to vary (lower) the national standards so they didn't look so bad. Some schools blatantly cheated on their test results.
I'm not intimately familiar with what happened after this but my sense is that even minimal standards went out of the window in the name of 'making no child feel bad'. Schools that are funded or ranked on their graduation rates lowered standards to the point where every effort was made to ensure that every student graduated high school (and standards be damned). COVID seemed to exacerbate the trend where it seems students were allowed to turn in virtually anything on any timeline.
School performance is highly correlated with the number of classroom disruptions. Not expelling or suspending disruptive students hurts all students (it seems the current fad is to remove all the other students from class when one is acting out). Sigh. Why?
So what's the way forward? Interestingly, we see the University of Austin put out a press release this week saying admissions will be based purely on test scores (I assume SAT or ACT). Exit exams would also have a salutary effect on standards (much like the bar exam, CPA, or nursing exam require professional schools to be more diligent. But is this just taking us back to a 'no college student left behind' type of regime? In the olden days, the solution was to trust the professionals. A professor (or teacher) knew and enforced the standards without fear or favor because they were inculcated with a professional duty. Once that was second guessed, the house of cards collapsed. Just my $0.02 worth, thanks for reading!
Steve! Yes! I subscribed to this newsletter SIMPLY to support this comment.
Student evaluations are the root of ALL OF THIS. If there was no formalized way for students to lie about why they hated a class (truth: they are lazy/bad at writing) -- then professors could teach.
I want so badly to end these damn evaluations. They've destroyed our profession and ended academic freedom.
We, as a nation, routinely see acceptable mediocrity as excellence. The criteria are not that difficult. Before graduation undergraduate students in the STEM disciplines should be able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs. Undergraduate students in the liberal arts should have a basic understanding of statistics and the scientific method. An understanding of how a constitutional democratic republic functions and the basics of evolutionary theory are, of course, important, but I don't want to sound too utopian.
I guess everyone agrees that getting rid of the department of education, or at least firing everyone there is a essential first step. You can argue all you want if it is the cause, but no one can disagree that they have solved nothing, and wasted a lot of money.
You have hit a sore spot on my soul. A more extended analysis by an angrier Mark Bauerlein is his The Dumbest Generation & The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.
I taught high school English & History at three different charter schools and spent the last nine years of my classroom career teaching Freshman Comp as an adjunct at two community colleges. I used to think phones were the culprit when trying to understand the lack of engagement by most of my students. But then a year ago I discovered the podcast series "Sold a Story" by Emily Hanford, produced by American Public Media. There I learned how we have been mis-teaching children how to read for a few generations now.
Phonics became politicized at least by the nineties, associated with home-schooling evangelicals whom mainstream teachers ignored/disdained because they were evangelicals who voted Republican. Consequently thousands of research papers examining how children learn to read and the best way to teach them were ignored for political reasons, and in many states continue to be ignored.
Given this datum, it is easy to extrapolate today's consequences and the attraction to phones, which are programmed to train people to be ADD. (Consequently, it's not really an "addiction.")
So, if you can't read well, you won't like to read. If you don't like to read, you won't read. If you don't read, your mental universe will be constricted. If your mental universe is constricted, you will gravitate to pictures over words, because you can't read the words.
Add to this foundation of the contemporary student the popularity of school "choice," which means at least by high school age students are picking their schools. Who's going to be tough academically if students simply walk rather than work? Charter schools are the beneficiaries of this freedom, but do nothing to merit anyone's loyalty, so they see the same dynamic from students who flee normal public schools.
If you are a poor reader and you are made to read, you will walk. Simple fact. My Freshman Comp classes typically saw half the class stick it out the entire semester. So professors are offering comic books (Manga, Graphic Novels) for college credit. That is how far we have sunk. But students understand, or think they understand pictures.
One last example. I took a class, History of Western Civilization, for college credit as a high school senior in 1970-1. If you were to page through the Palmer-Colton textbook, you would find very few pictures. Most of them were gathered in glossy sections and not given page numbers. I once occupied an office cube abandoned by a history adjunct, who left behind his recently published textbook on Western Civ. You could probably page through the entire book without seeing two facing pages with nothing but text on them. Approximately the same number of pages for each. That's where we are.
Some useful books to read about all this: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform; and just about anything that E. D. Hirsch has written since the 1980s.
This is a bit more subtle than you suggest: Public school kids are illiterate yes. But children who attend expensive private prep schools are highly literate. This means that the top colleges now accept mostly only those from prep schools or kids who can be determined to meet the covert DEI standards very much STILL in place in college admissions. The point is middle class white boys are, well, screwed.
That is precisely the problem: American leadership will soon come only from the wealthiest families. There is a decided gentry class that rules while the commoners will be entirely cordoned off from leadership. The Roman Catholic Church did the same thing when they discouraged most Catholics from reading the important texts. America will lose our democracy utterly when education is only available to those who already have the power and means to afford it and act on it. John Locke understood this in his Second Treatise: Education is essential for a functioning democracy. Plato thought that was impossible since some are simply unable to grasp the forms. America is about to find out what a bi-modal education model will be: The Noble Lie begins by telling the people only those who have gold in their souls will rule.
No doubt Plato's Republic is a blueprint for an authoritarian state. However, Plato is not wrong about many not being able to "grasp the forms" if you translate that into "succeed in education." Many do not have the talent to do well, let alone excel - the Blank Slate fallacy drives the opposite belief.
I began teaching at the University level in 1973. My students SAT scores were average, but they were willing to work. When I retired in 2006 my students SAT scores were much higher but they were unwilling to work.
“Editor’s Note: America is at war. This is not a traditional war, fought on a battlefield against an external enemy. It is a civilizational conflict against an internal enemy: the group quota regime, a revolutionary threat that seeks to reorganize American society around the principle of outcome equality — what the regime’s partisans call “equity.”
“This cold civil war may go unnoticed by many day-to-day, but its stakes are often as high as life and death. Here, Roger B. Cohen, a celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how the group quota regime has taken hold of the American medical education system and asks urgent questions about the consequences for medicine, for the sick, and for the country.”
Yes, so sad. It's the same all over the world. Young people (and not so young) walking down a street with their noses stuck in a 'phone. Zombies, as you say. A musician friend says that 95% of fans at their gigs just spend the entire concert recording it on their damn 'phones, not actually present, enjoying the moment. I have a vision of a civilization of totally incompetent people in about 40 years time, unable to care for themselves and no-one around to care for them. Maybe by then, AI will have taken over the world and gotten rid of all unnecessary humans..........................that is to say, most of us. I thank God I'm not young.
Don’t be so full of doom and gloom. Elon is teaching his AI powered humanoid robots how to keep kicking the can down the road which will enable us to outrun all our dreadful social and economic problems. It’s always darkest just before dawn. Soon the sun will shine and all will be well with the world.
I am hearing similar things from friends who are professors in the sciences. But at the same time, I am also hearing that getting into good colleges is extremely competitive. So is what's really happening is a divergence between the top students and the average student?
I live in Chicago and last August the DNC was here for 4 days. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder how people like me could have voted for someone like Trump?
Mayor calls for more ‘safe spaces’ after teen mobs overrun Streeterville, already one of the safest spaces in Chicago.
Excellent piece--except where you say, "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem." There's powerful two-way causality between education and society.
Moving along, at my Substack (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/elagabalus-sleezebiscuit-suthichai), I described my experiences as a college professor: "I’m convinced that it will be impossible to prevent students from using AI in their writing and that it’s counterproductive to even try. Instead, the challenge for professors will be to help students harness this capability. ... [My] students were uniformly bright, with SATs hovering just below Harvard’s. But 90% of them handed in prose that read as if they were suffering neurological disruptions. I eventually stopped assigning papers, because reading them was bottomless torture."
Then, I offered seven characteristics for differentiating A, B, C, D, and F students in a time of AI-assisted writing.
I was all on board with the essay until I got to this one line that, frankly, made me really mad. "I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem." This ABSOLUTELY is a K-12 eduction problem! I have 3 kids in K-12 right now. I recently pulled them out of public school (one of the "best in the country" Fairfax County, VA--what a joke) and we now pay a lot of money for private school, so they can have the kind of quality education I had in public school in the 90s. I can agree most individual teachers are doing the best they can, but the current system is entirely rotten. Kids are pushed into technology (computers, iPads) as early as kindergarten. They are not required to read entire books, let alone write about them. They don't take spelling tests or memorize their math facts. This is all done because the ideology now is that our foremost concern should be "mental health." Talk about your feelings a lot. Lots of breaks. Don't fail anyone, or discipline anyone, or make anyone feel bad. This is also because the peripheral education industry is always pushing the next new tool/course/etc. so we think if we just make the material newer/more fun/etc. that will fix it. Now that they are in Catholic school, my kids read a lot of books, memorize their math facts, and take weekly spelling (and other) tests. Phones are not permitted in class. Sometimes my kid gets an F--and he deserves if for not studying enough. They also talk a lot about service and what they can do for the wider society--versus identifying their victimhood and bemoaning what society should be doing for them. We MUST identify the problem if we are ever to reverse coarse. Our K-12 public education system is the problem.
I’m a Surgeon, and I’ve Never Been More Alarmed About My Profession.
City Journal.
“Today’s surgical residency graduates are increasingly unprepared for professional practice.”
Real Clear Politics. City Journal. Feb 26, 2025
https://www.city-journal.org/article/surgery-safe-american-college-of-surgeons
It's reasonable not to blame K-12 teachers but you should consider blaming the K-12 "thought leadership" that thoroughly gutted any respect for the humanities over the last generation. It seems many kids can get through their entire HS education without ever needing to read a full book cover to cover, let alone a full Shakespearean play. A lot of this was done in the name of chasing STEM which is fine in and of itself (assuming it has even worked to broadly improve STEM aptitude - has it?) but not at the expense of developing a shared cultural appreciation for arts, letters and beauty.
No Ray it is not about Stem vs Liberal Arts. it about honesty. Telling children in second grade that they failed their spelling test. And when they did not pass arithmetic in third grade that they would have to go to summer school. And in fifth grade banning them from school sponsored extracurricular activities until they understood the basics. And then later, teaching them that their failures were the result of victimhood of this that or the other form of societal oppression. Western Civilization is finished, not because of its greatness, but because it allowed its greatness to be socialized.
As the other commenter here has said, that same “thought leadership” simultaneously destroyed all rigor and standards in education (including and maybe especially in math), with a further sprinkling of idiotic ideas such as that kids should learn to read by recognizing whole words rather than learning to sound them out. The abysmal test scores tell us everything we need to know about how incompetent and destructive the educational regime has been.
I've been promoting hands-on learning and career-technical education for several decades now, not because it's for dummies -- not at all, but because it keeps kids engaged (producing much higher HS grad rates) and, to this author's point, IT CAN'T BE FAKED. You either get that engine running or you don't. You learn OHM's law because you need that knowledge to get the electrical system to work. Ditto for the math you need to complete a carpentry project. Or for coding software, etc.
This post makes me think that the advantages of career-technical curricula are more than practical, they are intellectual, forcing disciplined habits of the mind. AI can't fake that. Oh, and the kid who gains confidence in fixing an engine, gains confidence as a learner in other spheres as well, learning how to pursue questions in order to understand and address a problem. Even when, as in the humanities, there may be no hard-and-fast answer to a question, the habits of learning fostered by math and mechanics can help to overcome the bull-shitting tendencies that are all too common among the students the author describes.
Uggh. This is so freaking depressing, even if I already know. I notice the diminishment in a different sphere: I've practiced law for almost 30 years, and the kids today . . . not as good, and it's scary. New lawyers routinely come in with a bare rudimentary knowledge of evidence. Are we doomed? Phone addiction is definitely a huge factor.
I recently saw a video of Tucker talking to a retired surgeon who said the field of surgery has been dumbed down so much that you can no longer assume young surgeons are competent. Is there any area of our society that hasn’t been dumbed down for the sake of equity?
Yes, we’re doomed. Look at Trump’s kids. Morons all, Jared Kashner? And they went to good schools. I’ve taught, briefly, some of the Students the author describes and they are that bad and worse.
Would we have been better off if the democrats had won the election and Kamala was in charge? “Seeking asylum” is in effect open borders since it overwhelms “due process.” Democrats say all migrants, not only gang members, must have due process but there is no way we can give due process to 12 million migrants who came here during Biden’s term. This then is a deadlocked and impossible situation. I voted for Trump 3 times but now agree that he’s a disaster but would the democrats have been any better? Both sides seem intent on destroying the country although I still prefer the republicans since at least they want borders, meritocracy and don’t consider me racist white trash for being white, working class and conservative.
You are so right. mean, who could have INAGINED Trump was going to do what he is doing? Shocked, I tell you.
And I think both parties represent the Inebriati. The Knights Tippler. Obviously they are intentionally, intentionally and deliberately devoted to DESTROYING THE COUNTRY!!!
All part of a vast secret plan. I, as a semi-anonymous internet commenter, have far better plans!
There are several things that have led to this. One is the K-12 system and its relationship with the testing industry. Another is deeper. When I was young, pretty much the only way to experience a story on your own was through a book. I wanted stories, so I read and read. Now, people get that need met through many media so they are not strong readers and writers. Are there other ways to cultivate the deep thinking, the life of the mind, and achieve the cultural transmission of higher ed in addition to reading and writing, or even as a complement to it?
Your observations are spot on! I'm also a tenured Gen X professor with 30+ years experience at a variety of institutions from R1-R3 (currently at an R2 institution).
tl;dr Follow the incentives...
The $1m question is the root cause I guess. I see others wanting to blame the K-12 system (or cell phones), while you see a broader societal role. I personally think the root cause was a major shift in the incentive structure for professors (and teachers).
I'm just old enough to remember college before teaching evaluations. In those days, students were seen as products to be molded not customers. The top grades were reserved for the very best performers and the average grade was a C at my institution. Grades reflected your ability to meet a standard of excellence. An A meant the student had thoroughly mastered the subject matter (and even gone beyond). Of course, some professors used the same notes for 30 years and some were horrible teachers.
Enter student evaluations, that were originally pitched as ways to identify weaknesses and provide paths for self-improvement. That lasted about one semester, when student ratings started to be used for tenure and promotion decisions. Today in my state, a teacher that does not meet expectations in teaching can theoretically be fired from tenure in two years. Contingent faculty without tenure with poor teaching evaluations will often not get invited back after just one semester of teaching. These practices create HIGH POWERED INCENTIVES to make students happy. (Note, these are essentially customer satisfaction scores - 'did you like this course' rather than 'did you learn something in this course'). Raises are also often tied to 'teaching effectiveness'.
Professors have reacted by dumbing down courses and inflating grades. High grades for little or no work make students happy. It also makes administrators happy as students that pass their courses stay enrolled, pay more tuition and fees, and might even graduate on time (which helps rankings). Parents are also happy that little Joey or Jenny graduates with a high GPA that will set them up for grad school or a cushy job. It's a win-win-win right? Of course, society (or taxpayers) are the big losers as they heavily subsidize higher education but get inferior (or declining) performance in return. A basic undergraduate degree is not a ticket to the good life anymore.
K-12 has a similar incentive problem. No child left behind had the noble goal of making sure every student met a common national standard for reading, science, and math. It did this by creating HIGH POWERED SANCTIONS for schools. If you didn't meet the standard for each sub-group of students your school might be closed, your principal fired, etc. The inevitable happened. Teachers started teaching strictly to the test, and states lobbied to vary (lower) the national standards so they didn't look so bad. Some schools blatantly cheated on their test results.
I'm not intimately familiar with what happened after this but my sense is that even minimal standards went out of the window in the name of 'making no child feel bad'. Schools that are funded or ranked on their graduation rates lowered standards to the point where every effort was made to ensure that every student graduated high school (and standards be damned). COVID seemed to exacerbate the trend where it seems students were allowed to turn in virtually anything on any timeline.
School performance is highly correlated with the number of classroom disruptions. Not expelling or suspending disruptive students hurts all students (it seems the current fad is to remove all the other students from class when one is acting out). Sigh. Why?
So what's the way forward? Interestingly, we see the University of Austin put out a press release this week saying admissions will be based purely on test scores (I assume SAT or ACT). Exit exams would also have a salutary effect on standards (much like the bar exam, CPA, or nursing exam require professional schools to be more diligent. But is this just taking us back to a 'no college student left behind' type of regime? In the olden days, the solution was to trust the professionals. A professor (or teacher) knew and enforced the standards without fear or favor because they were inculcated with a professional duty. Once that was second guessed, the house of cards collapsed. Just my $0.02 worth, thanks for reading!
Steve! Yes! I subscribed to this newsletter SIMPLY to support this comment.
Student evaluations are the root of ALL OF THIS. If there was no formalized way for students to lie about why they hated a class (truth: they are lazy/bad at writing) -- then professors could teach.
I want so badly to end these damn evaluations. They've destroyed our profession and ended academic freedom.
We, as a nation, routinely see acceptable mediocrity as excellence. The criteria are not that difficult. Before graduation undergraduate students in the STEM disciplines should be able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs. Undergraduate students in the liberal arts should have a basic understanding of statistics and the scientific method. An understanding of how a constitutional democratic republic functions and the basics of evolutionary theory are, of course, important, but I don't want to sound too utopian.
I guess everyone agrees that getting rid of the department of education, or at least firing everyone there is a essential first step. You can argue all you want if it is the cause, but no one can disagree that they have solved nothing, and wasted a lot of money.
You have hit a sore spot on my soul. A more extended analysis by an angrier Mark Bauerlein is his The Dumbest Generation & The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.
I taught high school English & History at three different charter schools and spent the last nine years of my classroom career teaching Freshman Comp as an adjunct at two community colleges. I used to think phones were the culprit when trying to understand the lack of engagement by most of my students. But then a year ago I discovered the podcast series "Sold a Story" by Emily Hanford, produced by American Public Media. There I learned how we have been mis-teaching children how to read for a few generations now.
Phonics became politicized at least by the nineties, associated with home-schooling evangelicals whom mainstream teachers ignored/disdained because they were evangelicals who voted Republican. Consequently thousands of research papers examining how children learn to read and the best way to teach them were ignored for political reasons, and in many states continue to be ignored.
Given this datum, it is easy to extrapolate today's consequences and the attraction to phones, which are programmed to train people to be ADD. (Consequently, it's not really an "addiction.")
So, if you can't read well, you won't like to read. If you don't like to read, you won't read. If you don't read, your mental universe will be constricted. If your mental universe is constricted, you will gravitate to pictures over words, because you can't read the words.
Add to this foundation of the contemporary student the popularity of school "choice," which means at least by high school age students are picking their schools. Who's going to be tough academically if students simply walk rather than work? Charter schools are the beneficiaries of this freedom, but do nothing to merit anyone's loyalty, so they see the same dynamic from students who flee normal public schools.
If you are a poor reader and you are made to read, you will walk. Simple fact. My Freshman Comp classes typically saw half the class stick it out the entire semester. So professors are offering comic books (Manga, Graphic Novels) for college credit. That is how far we have sunk. But students understand, or think they understand pictures.
One last example. I took a class, History of Western Civilization, for college credit as a high school senior in 1970-1. If you were to page through the Palmer-Colton textbook, you would find very few pictures. Most of them were gathered in glossy sections and not given page numbers. I once occupied an office cube abandoned by a history adjunct, who left behind his recently published textbook on Western Civ. You could probably page through the entire book without seeing two facing pages with nothing but text on them. Approximately the same number of pages for each. That's where we are.
Some useful books to read about all this: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform; and just about anything that E. D. Hirsch has written since the 1980s.
This is a bit more subtle than you suggest: Public school kids are illiterate yes. But children who attend expensive private prep schools are highly literate. This means that the top colleges now accept mostly only those from prep schools or kids who can be determined to meet the covert DEI standards very much STILL in place in college admissions. The point is middle class white boys are, well, screwed.
The author makes clear he is not writing about "top colleges."
That is precisely the problem: American leadership will soon come only from the wealthiest families. There is a decided gentry class that rules while the commoners will be entirely cordoned off from leadership. The Roman Catholic Church did the same thing when they discouraged most Catholics from reading the important texts. America will lose our democracy utterly when education is only available to those who already have the power and means to afford it and act on it. John Locke understood this in his Second Treatise: Education is essential for a functioning democracy. Plato thought that was impossible since some are simply unable to grasp the forms. America is about to find out what a bi-modal education model will be: The Noble Lie begins by telling the people only those who have gold in their souls will rule.
No doubt Plato's Republic is a blueprint for an authoritarian state. However, Plato is not wrong about many not being able to "grasp the forms" if you translate that into "succeed in education." Many do not have the talent to do well, let alone excel - the Blank Slate fallacy drives the opposite belief.
I began teaching at the University level in 1973. My students SAT scores were average, but they were willing to work. When I retired in 2006 my students SAT scores were much higher but they were unwilling to work.
“Editor’s Note: America is at war. This is not a traditional war, fought on a battlefield against an external enemy. It is a civilizational conflict against an internal enemy: the group quota regime, a revolutionary threat that seeks to reorganize American society around the principle of outcome equality — what the regime’s partisans call “equity.”
“This cold civil war may go unnoticed by many day-to-day, but its stakes are often as high as life and death. Here, Roger B. Cohen, a celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how the group quota regime has taken hold of the American medical education system and asks urgent questions about the consequences for medicine, for the sick, and for the country.”
“The End of Merit in Med Schools Will Be Deadly.”
Real Clear Politics. Roger Cohen. Apr 2, 2024
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-end-of-merit-in-med-schools-will-be-deadly/
Yes, so sad. It's the same all over the world. Young people (and not so young) walking down a street with their noses stuck in a 'phone. Zombies, as you say. A musician friend says that 95% of fans at their gigs just spend the entire concert recording it on their damn 'phones, not actually present, enjoying the moment. I have a vision of a civilization of totally incompetent people in about 40 years time, unable to care for themselves and no-one around to care for them. Maybe by then, AI will have taken over the world and gotten rid of all unnecessary humans..........................that is to say, most of us. I thank God I'm not young.
Don’t be so full of doom and gloom. Elon is teaching his AI powered humanoid robots how to keep kicking the can down the road which will enable us to outrun all our dreadful social and economic problems. It’s always darkest just before dawn. Soon the sun will shine and all will be well with the world.
I am hearing similar things from friends who are professors in the sciences. But at the same time, I am also hearing that getting into good colleges is extremely competitive. So is what's really happening is a divergence between the top students and the average student?
Why would someone who doesn't want to read, or can't read difficult material, take a presumably elective course on Existentialism?
I live in Chicago and last August the DNC was here for 4 days. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder how people like me could have voted for someone like Trump?
Mayor calls for more ‘safe spaces’ after teen mobs overrun Streeterville, already one of the safest spaces in Chicago.
CWBChicago. Mar 30, 2025
https://cwbchicago.com/2025/03/mayor-calls-for-more-safe-spaces-after-mobs-of-teens-overrun-streeterville-already-one-of-the-safest-spaces-in-chicago.html
“Maybe We Should Stop Calling Them Schools.”
Real Clear Education. Mar 26, 2025
https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/03/26/maybe_we_should_stop_calling_them_schools_1100065.html
Excellent piece--except where you say, "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem." There's powerful two-way causality between education and society.
Moving along, at my Substack (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/elagabalus-sleezebiscuit-suthichai), I described my experiences as a college professor: "I’m convinced that it will be impossible to prevent students from using AI in their writing and that it’s counterproductive to even try. Instead, the challenge for professors will be to help students harness this capability. ... [My] students were uniformly bright, with SATs hovering just below Harvard’s. But 90% of them handed in prose that read as if they were suffering neurological disruptions. I eventually stopped assigning papers, because reading them was bottomless torture."
Then, I offered seven characteristics for differentiating A, B, C, D, and F students in a time of AI-assisted writing.