“A human being who has not been taught to think clearly is a danger in a free society.”
- Inside American Education
Charles Darwin once said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”. Unfortunately, today’s public school system is fueling this sentiment. Out are the days of teaching the basics of math, science, and reading using logical reasoning; in is the trendy new progressive variant of affective learning where classrooms focus on social-emotional learning and collective responsibility. Also known as proactivism, today’s students are being led down a damaging path, denying them the knowledge and skills necessary to prepare them for adulthood.
It is undisputed that America is at a time of great division. It may seem political, but the real gap is not just right or left, Republican or Democrat. Increasingly, the most serious divide is between the informed and the uninformed. Ironically, those with the most formal education tend to be the least informed. This absence of knowledge can be traced back to an education system that teaches its students not how to think, but what to think, leaving too many students unable and unwilling to question authority when necessary.
How often have we seen college students meltdown over a difference in opinion, sending them to their campus crying rooms for relief? After 12 years of elementary learning and four more years of higher education, these so-called scholars have been programmed to believe that whatever a person in authority, whether it is a government bureaucrat, a TV newscaster, or one of many proverbial “experts”, says should be accepted at face value. Most are unaware that these entities are largely there to sell a narrative, one that is often one-sided. Nor is there any intellectual curiosity when their long-held theories fail to materialize.
It starts in K-12, where the ABCs are increasingly being replaced with LGBT+++. Conventional education was focused on academic standards, using rote learning and textbooks, and was backed by discipline, when necessary. Today’s teaching has evolved into less rigorous holistic lessons that reshape attitudes and elevate feelings over knowledge, where one’s opinions matter more than facts. Children are taught a curriculum heavy on social justice, advancing issues over substance. And why not? The public school system has a captive audience of over 44 million children, who are legally required to be in school. Why not groom them for political advantage now and reap the benefits later?
The abandonment of intellectual development in upper education began when colleges were not receiving the diversity they wanted. To achieve the desired balance, a growing number of institutions began eliminating SAT scores, believing they were unfair to minority applicants. Students instead were given credit for social factors over academic achievement. This in turn led to a lack of academic standards. Then when lower standards produced lower performance, the gap was filled with affirmative grading, the equivalent of earning a trophy for simply showing up. While new admissions standards succeeded in increasing the number of minority applicants they had hoped for, the percentage of these students who failed to graduate rose to 74, nearly twice as high as whites.
There was a time when schools trained the mind in several disciplines intending to turn out competent adults to work and live in a free society. Now, standards are lowered for the express purpose of aiding students in simply clearing the bar for entrance into universities. Those fortunate enough to make it out of the system with a degree, make up for their lack of education with brazen narcissism. This absence of knowledge that began in K-12, and continued in higher education, makes schools and colleges centers of indoctrination rather than learning.
Unsurprisingly, in nearly every state, the average private school cost is now less than the average annual per-pupil public school expenditure. Whether private schools, religious schools, charter schools, or homeschooling, these alternatives have overwhelmingly produced better outcomes, by abandoning social issues in a return to the basics. Results have been most impressive in minority and low-income areas, where students have advanced as much as two grade levels in just one school year. In fact, teachers in alternative education settings often have fewer credentials but produce better results. Yet barely 10 percent of students in K-12, are in private schools. Fortunately, those numbers are likely to grow following legislation in many states allowing parents to direct public money to their educational setting of choice, and not directly to the local public school. In response, public school unions and their teachers have done everything they can to prevent school choice from advancing. Alternatives to the public school system take money out of teachers' pensions and expose the poor education coming from many classrooms.
In Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book, “Inside American Education”, Sowell exposes the unfortunate shift in teaching to social issues and activism, to the detriment of American students. Little has changed, except to get worse, in the three decades since the book was written. As Sowell so elegantly writes, “Having opinions without knowledge is not much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance”.
American anarchist and author Michael Malice once said, “It’s easier to train a smart dog than a dumb dog”. Perhaps this is why those with the most formal education follow along so compliantly. They may exit the education system with more credentials, but that doesn’t automatically translate to competence. With American public schools abandoning the prioritization of knowledge over activism, many become nothing more than programmed automatons that foolishly develop confidence despite their lack of understanding. Then, armed with only one side of every story, they advocate for dangerously destructive policies.
With confidence coming from ignorance rather than knowledge, our public school system continues to churn out brainwashed and uninformed citizens into the world. Until analytical study, logic, and skills training are returned to the schools, the free society we desire will fail to be realized.
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