Is Our Educational System An Existential Threat to Students’ Future?

-By Gary Null

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Recently I watched a video on the YouTube channel A Homestead Journey called “Teachers Are DONE & Speak Out — Something Is Very Wrong With America’s Youth.” I believe the title is only partially correct. Something is indeed very wrong with a small portion of America’s youth. But the youth are not the disease. They are the symptom. What is actually wrong is how some people are parenting. What is wrong is how some curriculum is politicized with no parental input. What is wrong is individuals overseeing school boards who are bringing their woke ideology into that individual school. Those individual principals, school administrators, and school consultants who are steeped in the biased indoctrination of wokeism, critical race theory, and identity politics are part of the problem — and those individuals, including some parents, who have decided that a child must never be challenged, never made to feel anything but happy, loved, and endlessly affirmed, no matter what that child has or has not learned. What is wrong is parents who have abrogated their responsibility to be part of their own children’s proper education. And what is wrong is that part of our educational system that no longer allows teachers to teach what the students actually need to be properly informed and educated.

I have spent decades in the educational system at the college and university level. I have watched this collapse happen in real time.

So let us grade the system honestly. If I were handing out the report card, I would give part of the American educational system a C and the larger part a B. The educational system cannot be judged as if there is one standard, there are multiple outcomes based on multiple circumstances which I will describe. And in this essay I am not going to focus upon the youth in and of themselves — I am going to focus upon what led to this collapse, because collapse is exactly what it is. How did it happen? It happens when good people are given the wrong information — when they are told to expect that a smiling graduate of a high school or college will possess the tools he or she needs to succeed in life and to contribute in a measurable way to the larger society, but when was the last time you checked to see if it’s true? And I can share with you that some of the smiling graduates have been handed a diploma whether they honestly earned it or not and little else that will inform them about how to succeed in life.

When the Profession You Loved Is No Longer the Profession You Wanted

I have friends who were schoolteachers, and they loved the work. They knew they were part of a student’s journey, that even if they had a child in their classroom for only a year, they were handing that child a piece of the puzzle of life: how to understand cause and effect, how to solve problems, how to use common sense and reason. Today it is different. Today we react. We don’t reason.

Listen to what the teachers themselves are saying, because they are done pretending. One teacher explained why she left in the middle of the year. A student who wasn’t even assigned to her classroom was let in by a teacher’s aide, ignored her repeated instructions to leave, then called her names and threatened her with physical violence — sending her into a panic attack. She called the office. By the time she composed herself in a stairwell, she was told to go back and teach anyway, because there was a substitute shortage. By the end of the day, video of her humiliation was already circulating among the student body. The student who threatened her was sent home for the day. That was the entire consequence. No apology. No restorative conversation. The aide who let the student into the room faced no discipline at all. “That was when I knew,” she said, “the profession I once loved was no longer the profession I needed or wanted. I left a month later.”

That is not an isolated story. That is the profession now. Teachers are not leaving because they stopped caring about children. They are leaving because the system will no longer let them teach — will not let them teach self-management, respect, or accountability. They are told instead to keep the peace, keep bodies in the room, pass everyone along, and make the data look good. But when we do that, we are not protecting students. We are betraying them, sending them into a world that will hold them accountable for exactly the things we refused to teach them.

An eighth-grade history teacher with 110 students put numbers to the collapse: two of her students read on grade level. Eighteen read at a kindergarten level. Fifty-five read between second and fourth grade level — in the eighth grade. And it isn’t only reading. It is basic thinking. Her students struggle to decode a sentence, to infer meaning, to connect cause and effect, to follow an instruction with more than one step. She gave an assignment asking students to choose four constitutional principles and explain them in their own words. One student copied the instructions verbatim onto the page — including the line that told them not to copy the instructions. “These kids,” she said, “have a frightening ability for information to go from their eyes to their hands without passing through the brain.”

Another teacher, an AP instructor with thirteen years in the classroom, described watching her students lose the capacity to think critically, solve a problem independently, follow directions, or troubleshoot the simplest issue. They give up after a single unsuccessful search. They ask questions that are answered in writing directly in front of them. “I get asked thousands of questions a day,” she said. “It is not decision fatigue. It is question fatigue — answering questions students should be able to figure out with very little effort.”

Ask a fourth grader today why she should learn to read, and she will tell you the computer can read to her. Ask her why she should learn to count, and she will tell you the calculator can do it. One substitute teacher put it plainly: “If these children lose access to technology, we could have an entire generation that is helpless without the internet.” A high school teacher asked her sophomores, as teachers have asked sophomores for generations, to dream big — and where ten years ago students spoke of college and careers, and five years ago of becoming doctors and nurses, today they answer with fantasies of winning the lottery. “We have lost the ability for our young people to dream of doing something and being successful at something,” she said. “Instead, what they see is what the adult world has shown them: the only way to survive is to have a lot of money. Forget hope. Forget dreams. Just get cash.”

Teachers describe a first-grade lesson on Benjamin Franklin where, after the material was explained directly, only five students in the room could answer a basic comprehension question. They describe tenth graders complaining that a three-paragraph reading passage was “too much.” They describe a teacher pepper-sprayed by a student after confiscating a phone being used to cheat — and then watching people online defend the student who did the spraying. They describe a teacher who bought plastic magic wands with her own money to make a lesson fun, only to watch a student snap one in half and laugh in her face. “It is not about the plastic wand,” she said. “It is about the fact that they destroy things on purpose and do not care.”

And they describe the exhaustion of managing behavior instead of teaching. “About 90 percent of my job is managing behavior,” one teacher said. “I know I could teach anything, but if students are hanging from the ceiling, it is like herding feral cats every day.” Another: “I love teaching. I love changing students’ minds and helping them grow. But I do not get to teach. I spend my day managing behavior and teaching students how to regulate their emotions. I am not a counselor. I am not a behavior specialist. I am a teacher.”

The Big Reveal

So why is all of this happening now? The teachers can describe the collapse, but they cannot explain it — because the explanation is not in the classroom. It is in the social contract itself. Over the last several decades, we have all witnessed a change occurring within that contract. We have seen more divisiveness in the body politic. We have seen major changes that have impacted different Americans in different ways, and yet no real solutions ever seem to be at hand. Empty promises are made, and then everyone moves on.

Take immigration as one example. We are a country that has historically been made better by immigration. And a serious country would prepare the people who want to come and be part of the American experience. We should have subsidized schools in their home countries — schools that teach English, that teach our history honestly, the best and the worst of it. Places where people could get medical checkups, so no one carries a transmissible disease like tuberculosis into our communities. Where we could establish a proper background on each individual and understand how they would fit into our society. So that when they finally arrived, they would not arrive controlled by criminal cartels.

Because that is what happened instead. Hundreds of thousands of young women were brought in under threat: allow yourself to become a sexual slave, or your parents will be killed. A minimum of 500,000 young girls disappeared — many even after being in American protection. It is a matter of congressional record, and no one had any answers. The system was so corrupt, it allowed it.

We failed the people we brought in, and we failed the communities they were placed into. People came simply because it was a better life, however we did not look at the results of what strain it put on the neighborhoods where they landed. We did not have jobs for them — jobs matched to their backgrounds and strengths, jobs paying a living wage where they would not be exploited and would not take away American jobs or strain the budgets of the cities where they were dumped. We did not give them a place to stay free of gang control and organized crime, which was dominant. We went from 29,000 gangs to 33,000 gangs, with millions of members flooding into the United States — and we have seen the results. In some communities, such as the Somali population in Minnesota, a separate ideology remained dominant, and then we saw the massive fraud that grew out of it — and still no change. Everything we did, we did wrong.

And yet the debate divided into black and white: no one should be allowed in, or everyone should be allowed in. Neither was the right answer. People saw this. They discussed it. And no solution ever arrived that would make a difference. It is just one example of all the things we have watched go wrong in such a short period of time, all to the detriment of hundreds of millions of Americans. And every one of those failures eventually walked through the schoolhouse door.

The Overflowing Classroom

And here is the part of the immigration story that no one discusses at all: what happens when millions of unregistered immigrants come into the United States — some with good intent, others simply to exploit our ideological system, because that is what it is. If we had an intelligent immigration policy, which historically we have had, it would be not only understandable but embraced by most Americans. Instead we threw open the border knowing that terrorist groups from around the world would be able to enter — and they have; many have been caught, and the federal agencies themselves have expressed grave concern. Organized crime came in from every corner of the globe. Gang members flooded in by the tens of thousands. They did not come here for peaceful coexistence. They came here for exploitation. And they have succeeded.

But no one is discussing what all of this does to a schoolteacher. Depending on the size and location of the school, a teacher can manage a class of twenty to twenty-five students. Now millions of children have flooded the systems — especially in the places where they were taken and simply dumped: New York, Denver, Washington, Oregon, California. Suddenly you put fifty students into a class — classrooms that should be three classrooms’ worth of students, all pushed into one. The teachers are overwhelmed. You have created an impossible situation. But the politicians, the technocrats, the ideologues who are behind this insane process do not care — because it is not their days and their nights spent lying awake wondering, what am I supposed to do?

And then you have the problem that they do not speak English. A teacher who had a normal classroom of children who speak the language and are there to learn now has, seated beside them, children who cannot speak it and know nothing about our culture — and it is dumped on that teacher to teach both groups simultaneously. It becomes impossible. Even the student from Somalia or from any of a hundred other countries who sincerely wants to learn — how can they? The teachers say it themselves: what am I supposed to do when teaching the children who need this additional input holds up every other student in the room? I do not have the time to give them what they need or to answer the questions they have. And think it through one step further: how do you teach English to children from 150 different countries unless the teacher is proficient in the language each child arrived with? Spanish is manageable — that covers much of Central and South America and Mexico. But what about the fifty-four countries of Africa? Nothing was thought out. Nothing was followed through to its likely outcome. We cared only about the macro effort — throw open the borders, and what happens, happens. And the authorities certainly would have been aware of the consequences — especially our worthless Department of Education, captured long ago, which should be closed.

The numbers confirm what the teachers already know. As of the federal government’s own count, more than 5.3 million public school students — nearly 11 percent of all enrollments, and rising for over a decade — are classified as English learners, with the concentration reaching one in five students in Texas and comparable levels in the sanctuary destinations. And what does the system produce for them? On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth-grade English learners score 32 points below their English-speaking classmates in reading — a gap that has not closed in a single assessment since the government began measuring it in 1998. In California, home to more English learners than any other state, only about 13 to 14 percent are reclassified as proficient in any given year, and barely half reach proficiency by the end of elementary school. The rest become what the bureaucrats call “long-term English learners” — children who sit in American classrooms for six, eight, ten years without ever mastering the language of instruction, while the teacher is expected to educate them and everyone else at once. That is not a program. That is a warehouse.

So then you get what is known as a floating average. You take your A student and your F student and you give them both Cs. That is not good for the school. It is not good for its ranking. It is not good for its funding. And then a whole political agenda is built on top of it to give a false narrative of how educated our students are. Indeed, at one time they were — and in some places they still are. Understand the arithmetic: it takes only about fifteen percent of the public schools in the United States failing in any one of these areas to drag down the average of the whole. If we were to measure only the schools where the students are competent and qualified in math, English, civics, and history, our rankings would be much higher. But you have to be honest — and honesty is the one thing the system will not permit.

I return to the idea I have shared for decades: help the person in the country they are originating from, before they immigrate. See that they are taught English in their own country — or the language of whatever country they are going to, as should have been done in Sweden. Teach them math. Teach them a class on the history and the culture of the nation they are about to join. It is not a person’s fault when they arrive in a country unprepared and then do not fit in — and people conclude, well, they are just lazy, they are just exploiting the social welfare system. For some, that is true. Sweden is one good example. Great Britain is another. Minnesota is a very good example, where Somalis arriving from a country with nothing resembling a quality educational system brought that culture with them — and the political party in power saw to it that they were given every benefit possible, in the belief that at election time they would be motivated to vote for the people who gave them a free ticket into America without any other consideration. And if we were serious, the solution is sitting in plain sight: the federal government owns millions of square feet of empty office space and buildings around the country. Convert those empty buildings into classrooms — into transit educational institutions — so that the people coming here arrive prepared to learn rather than positioned to fail.

Then ask the question nobody in power wants asked: who pays for all of this? Who pays for the hotels in New York? Who pays for the debit cards worth thousands of dollars? Who pays for the transportation — a payment stream promptly exploited by the NGOs? Who pays when these millions enter the hospital system, receive free medicine, enter any educational institution — and even receive Social Security benefits without ever having worked a life putting a percentage of their earnings into the system? They do not pay. We do. You are not even being asked; you are being ordered: the average American’s taxes will be raised everywhere they can be raised to pay for this, and still there is not enough money. New York already faces a budget hole of some $12 billion from it — and it is only going to increase under the mayor and the people now in power, as it will in other cities where a whole group of new socialists is coming into influence. It is a prescription for disaster. Meanwhile we asked no questions and checked no backgrounds — so whole countries, like Venezuela, emptied their prisons and sent them to America, and the cartels and organized crime of the world did the same.

Now hold that up against the life of the average American. What happens if you do not have the rent? You are evicted. If you cannot pay your mortgage? You are foreclosed on. If you cannot afford the car payments? It is repossessed. This is a population that struggles daily for proper housing, for quality food, for clothes, for a good school for their children — a population in which most people cannot write a check for $500, in which more than 200 million Americans say a $1,000 check would bounce, living paycheck to paycheck. And now automation, innovation, downsizing, and artificial intelligence are decimating hundreds of thousands — soon millions — of their jobs. Google fired 36,000 of its employees in a single morning: a notice at six o’clock — do not come back to work, your job no longer exists — no benefits, no severance, nothing. Why? Because Google made errors in its investment in artificial intelligence, and though the company was extremely profitable, the profit was eaten up building data centers that have not worked out. So how do you solve a problem you created? Fire the people who did not create it. The government has no Plan B for these people’s lives — because these people are not important. What were they called by the spokesperson for the World Economic Forum? Useless eaters.

And in some cities the corruption has hardened into arithmetic. Minnesota is one good example of what I would call a trifecta of insanity: over sixty percent of the people in certain communities on permanent welfare; on top of that, workers’ compensation claims running as high as fifty percent in some areas — a statistical impossibility; so that between those not working and those working while claiming injury, you can reach as much as eighty percent of a population living off the people who still live by the social contract. And it does not stop, because those who created the system interfere with every effort to expose it. There were investigators all over Minnesota and California — government employees — who had the proof that massive corruption, massive fraud, massive theft was occurring on a never-before-seen level. They were told by the attorneys general and the governors to stand down, and they were prevented from taking it public. Some became whistleblowers and took it public anyway. Still, those in power — because they controlled the Justice Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, the White House — chose to suppress the information. Now that we are finally able to see the truth, it is staggering. And those who created this have not been held accountable. Not a single person.

So what do you think this does to the average American — not the rich, not the powerful — who says: I do not get free food. I do not get free medical care. I do not have health insurance; if I get sick, I am bankrupt. I am working two jobs and still cannot make my mortgage payment, my electric bill, my car payment. Roughly 230 million Americans are living at the low end of the economic scale, and they are not being cared for at all — while the millions coming in are handed everything and asked for nothing, and when some among them commit crimes, there is a GoFundMe for the murderers and the rapists. Chicago just lost its Walmart stores — and the innocent, honest, decent people left behind are now living in a food wasteland. That is why people are moving to states that do not have sanctuary cities and do not allow these policies: a better quality of life, safer streets, a better education for their children, and an environment that still respects the social contract.

The parents who remain are rendering their verdict in another way. When a family calls a realtor today, the first request is: send me information on the quality of the school — how it ranks, its educational standards, whether there is violence, what the curriculum is. Parents want to know all of it, because they have seen what happens when you do not ask the right questions — when you simply assume that your kids are in a good school and will get a good education from good teachers. Indeed, historically and even now, that is still true in the majority of American schools — but not all. One of the reasons so many people have left cities like San Francisco and New York is that the public schools failed them. And what if you are against the curriculum, how it is taught, and the absolute control of school boards and their ideologies over your child’s education? Then you homeschool, or you pay for a private school — which is why the private schools are packed. The private schools are much like the charter schools, except that the charters are generally better maintained, more disciplined, and held to a higher level — because a self-entitled student from a self-entitled parent will not be allowed to fail at a private school. But they cheat there also. We do not have a perfect solution for anything, because we do not have perfect politicians, perfect systems, or perfect agencies. They are all inefficient, deficient, and frequently corrupt or indifferent. And every last consequence of it falls back on a teacher.

So we are a nation divided, and the schism is getting larger, wider, deeper. When people do not have intelligent discussions, we do not look at the truth of what we have created. It is a blight, and nobody wants to take responsibility for it now that it is unraveling. So we just yell and scream at each other — tribal and primal, reptilian in our emotional reactions. And do you think the children and teenagers are not aware of all this? Do you think it does not influence them? It does.

Then Came COVID

And then, on top of all of it, came COVID — and every single thing we were told about COVID was a lie. Do not get treated until you are blue and have to go to the emergency room — and then be intubated: the wrong treatment. Remdesivir: the wrong treatment. You were told a COVID test would tell you whether you were positive: it produced 87 percent false positives. You were told to stay six feet apart from one another: no science whatsoever. And the children were told to stay six feet apart — and then to stay home.

They were told to wear masks — masks that increased carbon dioxide toxicity and bacterial overgrowth inside the mask, and did not prevent the viral infection to begin with. We had soccer players running full sprints in masks — extraordinarily dangerous for the lack of oxygen coming in and the lack of carbon dioxide leaving the body, causing massive oxidative stress. But we did it. They were told they had to be vaccinated, and boosted every year, to attend school. And one hundred percent of the science now shows that the worst thing we could have done was precisely the protocol we followed.

And while all of this was happening, the children were out of the educational system entirely. What we tried in its place did not work. Homeschooling filled some of the gap, but remote learning was a disaster — and the results are not a matter of opinion. They are the very numbers you will see throughout this essay: the historic collapse in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores between 2019 and 2023, the lowest reading proficiency in three decades. We set an entire generation of children back because we had the wrong information and the wrong protocols from the wrong people — and then we handed their report card to the world.

Now the truth is surfacing. With the subpoena of Anthony Fauci, and the very damning documents shared by Tulsi Gabbard on her last day in office, we are learning that Fauci had secretly paid for and opened 121 gain-of-function laboratories — biological weapons labs — all of it secret. He lied, and thousands of scientists who were part of it lied with him. There may yet be an awakening — especially if he is held accountable and pays a price for it.

But understand: no one who ordered people to follow Fauci’s orders has repented, apologized, or said, I have learned my lesson. None. The misinformation people are still in power — in the governments, in social media, on the platforms, among the influencers — while thousands of new scientific articles come out showing us the truth: we should not have been vaccinating anyone. So add up all of these misadventures visited upon children and teenagers, and then imagine that you are a good parent, or two good parents, doing the best you can — working while your own future and security are in constant jeopardy, facing a real existential threat at the economic level, having watched millions of Americans become homeless, living in their vans, their RVs, their cars, with no stable living environment — and all the while competing for your own child’s developing mind against outside forces you have no control over. Now you understand why there is such concern. There will be people who come along and simply try to deny all of this. But you cannot leave it out of the equation — otherwise you are living in gross denial of the reality that many people have to face. You must take every one of these efforts, and competing efforts, to influence a young person’s developing mind into consideration.

The Death of Consequences

So what did we get? We got riots. We got disruptions in classrooms, in schools, in one municipality after another. Starting around 2020, we got hundreds of thousands of people walking into businesses and simply stealing — and in California, if what you took was worth under $950, there was no consequence at all.

It spread. In a single year, New York City lost over $4.2 billion in stolen merchandise. Thousands of small businesses closed. Even some of the major stores closed. Major food supermarkets closed — Whole Foods pulled out of Seattle — leaving large areas as food deserts, where a local person could no longer go out and easily find a store with a decent selection of food. You could no longer walk into a shop and simply pick up what you needed. Everything was locked up. It had to be.

Not because the average American was stealing. Not the average parent, or student, or teacher. They weren’t. The vast majority of American families did not steal, because they would not steal — because it is immoral, because it breaks the social contract we have honored for generations: you do not take what is not yours. But those who did steal had a field day, and the plague spread precisely to the cities that had announced there would be no consequence for bad behavior. And once that message was sent, that kind of behavior began seeping into families themselves.

Then came the violence. The first of it I began to see was in Brooklyn, where on Fridays a thousand or more teenagers would pour out of school, head to Coney Island Beach, and simply brawl — hurt people. More recently, the Friday afternoons where they descend on some student’s home and just party, drink, do drugs. And there was no consequence. Then, in just the last several months, the street takeovers — a phenomenon we have never seen in American history — where hundreds to thousands of teenagers gather to race cars, burn cars, and beat anyone who interferes. Just last week, two people were shot and a third was killed at a single street takeover, and in some cases the police no longer arrest anyone. We have seen groups of teenagers chase down a man on a bicycle and beat him to death with no consequence. We have seen smash-and-grab, breaking and entering. We have seen gang members recruiting students inside the schools — and not even barred from the building.

And for at least the past five years, in schools that have been neglected — run down, generally in poor neighborhoods, where the teacher is stressed — some students act out in class with total impunity. They can play music while the teacher is trying to teach. They can mock the teacher. They can beat the teacher. They can bloody the teacher. And nothing happens to the student. There is no real consequence.

Now, we have to keep this in proper perspective, because this is not happening in the majority of our schools. The reality is that in most American schools, from first grade to twelfth, you can still get a good education. School is still a safe place to go — a positive, formative oasis where, if a student wants to learn, they can. Good teachers, good principals, good fellow students, and no brawls. That truth matters, and I will return to it. But the exception is growing, and it grows wherever a single idea has taken root: that there should be no consequence for anything.

The Ghettoization of the Mind

Alongside the physical decay of some neighborhoods, something worse has taken hold: the ghettoization of a child’s mind. It begins in the home. It is confirmed through the media. And it is preached daily by the race hustlers and the highly politicized social influencers, who insist that everything in life reduces to one brutal equation — you are either a perpetrator or you are prey.

Think about what that does to a young mind trying to evolve. If a child grows up in a household where everyone feels like a victim and wants to blame someone else for their position in society, for the circumstances of their existence, that child is a sponge, absorbing all of it. The indoctrination begins at home. It is reinforced by strangers on the internet. And then, in a particular kind of school, it is manifested — accepted, even taught, by the ideology of some teachers. We must keep in mind that this is happening in a limited number of areas. But in those areas, it is total.

And do not imagine this ideology stays in the schools. It has reached the highest levels of government. Just this week, a top equity administrator at the State Department was challenged in Congress over circulated memos declaring that you cannot hire a straight white male for anything — and the man who ran the division claimed, under oath, not to know. Imagine what happens once that wokeism, that critical race theory, that predator-or-prey doctrine gets up on the internet and circulates. People will begin to see themselves as predator or prey — and most people, if they believe that nonsense, will conclude they are prey. More and more Americans see themselves as victims, and a victim needs someone to blame. So the consensus-gathering begins: who is to blame for all this? If you’re white, you’re to blame. And a child marinated in that ideology walks into school not to learn, but to accuse.

Compared to What?

Our educational system can only be measured honestly in one way: against the other educational systems of the world. Here is where we need to see students earning great grades, behaving, not acting out, not joining gangs, not doing these abhorrent things. Take France. Take China, India, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Italy. Compare how they are doing in their educational institutions to how we are doing in ours — both in grades one through twelve, and then through our colleges. We thought we were doing okay. Compared to what?

Here is the answer, in numbers no one can spin. On the most recent PISA examination — the international test given to fifteen-year-olds across 81 education systems — American students scored 465 in mathematics, twenty-sixth in the world, statistically no better than the average industrialized nation and below 25 other systems, including Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Estonia. Singapore’s students scored 575 — the equivalent of several grade levels ahead of ours. Only 7 percent of American students performed at the top levels in math, below even the modest international average. And understand: our ranking actually rose from the previous test, not because our students improved — our math scores fell — but because everyone else’s students, after the pandemic, collapsed slightly faster. We are climbing the rankings of a sinking fleet. Our fifteen-year-olds still read comparatively well, sixth in the world — which tells you the collapse is concentrated exactly where rigor can no longer be faked: mathematics.

The trend lines are worse than the snapshot. On the TIMSS international math assessment, American fourth graders dropped 18 points between 2019 and 2023, and eighth graders dropped 27 points — erasing three decades of progress and returning us to where we stood in 1995. Our eighth graders now rank twenty-second among the 44 participating systems, behind not just Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, but a growing list of countries that spend a fraction of what we spend. And the students become the adults: on the OECD’s survey of adult skills, American adults’ literacy scores fell 12 points in just six years. Older American adults score above the international average. Our younger adults — the ones our system most recently finished educating — score below it. Read that sentence again. Each American generation is now measurably less literate than the one before it.

And here is the part that should make every taxpayer furious: we are not failing on the cheap. The United States spends roughly $20,400 per student from primary school through college — more than a third above the international average of about $15,000 — and devotes 5.8 percent of our GDP to education against an average of 4.7. We pay like the best system in the world and perform like a thoroughly average one. Where is the money going? Not to the teachers, as we will see. Not to the students.

The colleges tell the same story. Yes — we still have institutions we can proudly and honestly say are among the best on earth. Seven of the world’s top ten universities are American: MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Yale. But look beneath the summit. In the latest Times Higher Education world rankings, the United States placed only 35 universities in the top 100, down from 38 the year before, and 102 in the top 500 — the lowest total ever recorded, down from 125 in 2018. American institutions are scoring lower year after year on research strength, on citation impact, on reputation, while China now has five universities in the global top 40, up from three the year before. Look at our standards for graduating, and then look at the universities of the rest of the world. Some of ours remain the finest anywhere — but not all, and fewer every year.

And when you start comparing honestly, you see other realities. A lawsuit was filed and won against Harvard and other schools for discriminating against applicants from Asian backgrounds — students penalized precisely because they had the highest grades and the highest test scores. Why do those students excel? It is not genetic. Growing up in an Indian household does not make you genetically more capable. It is that the home held different criteria and the community backed them up — an acceptance of how to do things correctly, within the context of doing them ethically and morally. Those are the students least likely to cheat, because the standard begins at home. When the parents believe something is right and support you in it, and your peers believe it is right, then — allowing for the exceptions that always exist — the majority live it. It is real.

For those students, education is not a game and not a facade. They really want to learn. They want an honorable degree from a respected institution, because that is the moment their life becomes their own — the moment they become its architect. Up to that point, everyone else has been the architect: parents, aunts, uncles, teachers. That education lets them build the career, the family, and the quality of life they believe will come if they do it right. And that takes discipline. It takes focus. It takes time. They do not carry the mindset that you are either a predator or a victim. They see that mindset as foolish and immature — and they are right.

Who Benefits from the Collapse?

So who profits from keeping things this way? Follow the failure to its source, and more often than not you arrive at the sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. If your body politic is corrupt — if your city council is biased, if your mayor, your attorney general, your governor, your district attorney were selected with funds from George Soros, who has poured over $100 million into these social-justice advocates and activists — then you have a system that fails the majority of people while rewarding those who subscribe to the ideology. And it trickles down. If a gang member or a cartel says, let’s go up to New York City, because we can steal billions of dollars and nothing will happen to us — and we will make more money selling stolen merchandise out of a warehouse than we make on prostitution or drugs — then theft becomes an industry, and everyone who wants fast money joins it.

That is why you do not see the ghettoization of America as a whole. You see a high quality of life and a high standard of living across most of the United States — but not everywhere. You see outstanding teachers, and graduates who did their own homework, who are proud of themselves, who are going out to contribute something to society — not because they feel victimized and angry, not because they started life with a predetermined conclusion about how it must go, but because they are looking at life honestly. That is the majority of Americans. But majorities do not set policy. Imagine that the majority of Americans do not want war, but the people in power do. Then you have war — until those people are voted out. And it is never only the officeholders. It is everyone who benefits from the choices that take us to war: the military-industrial complex, the spy complex, the financial complex, the medical-industrial complex. They need wars to survive. It is totally corrupt. Education is no different. The policy is set by those who benefit from the collapse, never by those who suffer it.

So when you ask about our youth, please do not make the mistake of assuming that all youth are equally vulnerable. Standing between a teenager and the millions of influencers on TikTok and social media is everything that child has already received: good grounding, good guidance, good input from good parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends in the community. They take all of that as the bedrock of good morals and good ethics, and they are good people. That is the majority. But when was the last time you saw the media showing good teenagers doing good things, and the joy and happiness that come from that? Almost never. The fact that we do not show the good part of the American experience does not mean we are not living it every single day, whatever the struggles.

Then there is the other percentage — the ones who cheat, who do not go to school to learn, who do not care about educating themselves, who feel entitled, who feel they are better than others. The ones who exploit indoctrination as a substitute for education, for their own benefit. They are a small segment, but they are empowered, and they have gained a foothold of acceptance. Every time you hear them, they are condemning, they are angry at someone or something, and they seem to hate America. And now a whole group of them is being elected — running, in effect, for the Office of Hate America — promising an ideology of socialism to students who have never once set foot in Cuba. I have. I have stayed in the homes of average Cuban people. I have had some very influential people in Cuba tell me the truth about how the system did not work and how it controlled the population for decades. But when you are fed misinformation every single day — as we have been about diet, where even smart people, people with PhDs and MDs, eat food that gives them cancer, diabetes, and strokes and never connect cause and effect — information alone does not save you. A young person growing up today has more information than any generation in human history. The question is: how do they separate out the part that makes them wiser?

Don’t Blame the Teachers’ Unions

Some people condemn the unions — the teachers’ unions. I do not, for a simple reason: the victims here are more often not just the students but the teachers themselves. In some areas, the classroom is quite literally a battleground, and the teacher is standing in the middle of it. What teachers actually face are the policy makers in the hierarchy above them — the ones who allowed, encouraged, and demanded that schools be stocked with layer upon layer of administrators: the woke administrators, the equity administrators. Look at an actual school budget and you discover that the money is not going to the students or the teachers. It is going to whole teams of administrators. And then you realize: that is not education. That is politics and ideology wearing education’s name.

So do not blame the unions, because then you would be blaming the teachers. Blame the people in any institution who control the outcome. Think of how many people work for the federal government who are against war, against the suffering of innocents — and have no power. The person in the White House has the power. Think of the people in the Defense Department, the Pentagon, the State Department who do not want to see us invade other countries. They are not the policy makers either. In every venue, it is the policy makers who are ultimately responsible for the product that comes out of it, the philosophy that comes out of it, the ideology that comes out of it — whether it is benevolent and positive, or manipulative and destructive. And what our educational policy makers have produced, you have now seen: in the classrooms, and in the numbers.

Historically, No One Acted Out

Now think about how people were educated throughout history — by Socrates and the other great teachers we still credit today for shaping how human beings think. No one acted out. When I went to school, no one acted out. When my parents went to school, nobody acted out. If you struck a teacher, you were removed from school, and everyone in the community would know something was deeply wrong in that home. Children in the one-room schoolhouses of an earlier America — the Little Red Schoolhouse — came out better educated by every measure than the average student walking out of a well-funded modern high school today. Just look at the numbers.

And the numbers are damning. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the share of American students meeting basic reading proficiency fell to its lowest level in more than three decades. Only 30 percent of students nationally now meet the NAEP reading proficiency standard, down from 35 percent in 2019 — and there are now more fourth graders scoring “below basic” than there are fourth graders who are proficient. Today, roughly 21 percent of American adults — some 43 million people — have limited literacy skills or are functionally illiterate. This is happening in a country that spends more per student than almost any other nation on earth.

It is not confined to grade school. Even Berkeley — once among the most respected liberal arts universities in the country — now acknowledges what its own math department found: large shares of incoming students test below entry level for basic college calculus, some needing refreshers on fractions and exponents before they can even begin. At UC San Diego, one in twelve incoming students tested below middle school proficiency in math, despite carrying good high school grades the whole way. We see the same thing at Harvard, at Brown, at Berkeley, on campus after campus: students who cannot answer basic questions about the country they live in, its history, or its civics.

How did we get here? Because we made a decision, somewhere along the way, that no student should be allowed to fail — and once you make that decision, you no longer have an educational system. You have a credentialing system. We dump millions of students into higher education who are not remotely prepared for it, because school districts and universities are rewarded, dollar for dollar, for the bodies they push through the door. Budgets climb, tens of thousands of dollars per student, and the student who comes out the other end is no more literate, no more numerate, no more capable than the one who never had that money spent on him. The money goes to administrators. It does not go to the teachers. It does not go to the students.

Drowning in Information, Starving for Truth

But how does an entire nation of good people preside over a collapse like this without seeing it? Because we are inundated, overwhelmed, oversaturated — drowning in information. Some of it is accurate, needed, necessary, and honest. But the vast majority — I would put it at over 90 percent — of everything we are taught, told, and propagandized by influencers, dishonest journalists, celebrities, corporate interests, and governmental agencies benefits the people telling it. They profit by having everyone believe their narratives. But what if the narratives themselves are not honest?

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine Rachel Maddow looking into the camera one night and saying: “I realize that I told you that you must get the COVID shot. I told you that if you did, you would not go to the hospital, you would not die, and — most importantly — you would not spread it to others in your family. I said this to an audience of millions, and I was paid tens of millions to say it. But then I did some homework, because friends of mine told me there was more to this story than what I was reporting. I have an enormous resource base — unlimited access to governmental agencies and scientists — and yet I had taken 100 percent of what the government and its agencies, Anthony Fauci and the CDC and the FDA and the U.S. Public Health Service, told me. I did not challenge any of it. Then again, we did not challenge the Vietnam War, or the Afghanistan War, or the Iraq War, or the Syrian War, or the Libyan War, or our war on poverty, our war on drugs, our war on terror. Had we challenged those, there would have been a different outcome. So I did my own independent homework, and I found, to my surprise, that virtually everything I was told — and hence everything I told the public — was inaccurate. I certainly did not intend to mislead you. But I did.”

That confession never happened, and it never will. Because she could not simply go on the air and apologize — if she did, who would believe anything else she had to say? So the establishment decided, en masse, to keep telling the same story ad infinitum. And as a result, no one in the media has told us the truth about anything of consequence, because telling it would directly impact them personally — their income, their stability, their future. Tell the truth in America today about anything that matters, and there is a high probability that a campaign will be launched to destroy you, at every level, before you can finish your first sentence.

And hence we do not learn our lessons, and we do not learn from history — because the same people control the narrative of what is true history and what is not. This is precisely what happens inside the schools. Students do not know their curriculum has been politically slanted, as it is in Cuba, in Russia, and in so many other countries — especially the history curriculum — because they were never taught how to search for the truth on their own. We have to realize how far we have diverted our attention, how much we have sublimated, because it is a mess, it is highly ideological, and there are whole groups of people — millions within our society — who have been led by their ideology without ever looking at the consequences.

Merit Still Exists — Just Not Where They’ll Let It

I want to be clear that this is not happening in every school. It is not happening, as a rule, in the charter schools, where discipline and meritocracy remain the basis of the enterprise. In Georgia, charter high schools posted a 90.3 percent graduation rate in 2025 — outperforming the statewide average of 87.2 percent — and more than a quarter of them graduated 100 percent of their students in four years, compared to just 4 percent of traditional public schools. Nationally, research from Mathematica has found charter school graduation rates running seven to eleven percentage points higher than public schools serving the same areas. These are, disproportionately, schools serving poor kids. And they are not the schools handing an F student a B because failing him might reflect badly on the institution. They are proof that when standards are held, disadvantaged students rise to meet them. That is the story wokeism does not want told, because it destroys the premise that low expectations are compassion.

I know this collapse from the inside, not just from statistics. I was teaching a course where I noticed two students who never once showed up to class. I asked the room if anyone knew them. They did — the two women were sitting out in the hallway. I went out and asked them directly why they weren’t in class. They told me, without embarrassment, that they weren’t going to attend class at all — not once, not ever — and they still expected to graduate. “This is the new empowerment,” one told me. I told her that wasn’t empowerment; it was the opposite. The rest of my students — every one of them Black or Latino, every one of them attentive, respectful, working hard, several of them the first in their families reaching for a step up — were furious. One young woman told me plainly: “I do my homework, I listen, I study, I come from a poor background, and I’m trying to use this education to take a step up and out in life. Merit counts.” She was right. It should.

I finished the course and gave the two students who never attended a single class the grade they had earned: zero. I was called into the administration office and told, in essence, that I could not do that — that if I failed students who had defiantly refused to attend a single class, “there’s going to be demonstrations outside that are racist, and we can’t handle that.” I was told that if I would not change the grades, I would have to resign. I resigned on the spot. I went back and told my class why. They understood. That was decades ago, and it was only the beginning. Everything I predicted that day has come to pass across the entire system.

The Newark Experiment: I Saw What Was Possible

Let me tell you about the moment I saw, with my own eyes, what is possible when every excuse is stripped away. Roughly twenty years ago, I was approached by the owner of a charter school in Newark. She told me they were doing the best they could to raise the educational standards of their students — all of whom were children of color from the poorest parts of Newark — but that there was a lot being left out of the equation. Could I help?

So I went to the school. I studied its curriculum. I studied the backgrounds of its teachers. But it was when I began speaking with the students that I suddenly understood something equally important. These students were there, and happy to be there, because the public schools had already failed them. And when you have spoken with a hundred students from different backgrounds and they are all telling you the same thing — that the teachers want to teach, and try to teach, but that what happens in the home, what happens with peer pressure, what happens in the larger social world a young person carries into the classroom is as important as anything the school can offer — you understand that this is the thing no school ever resolves, even though every student is living it.

I told them I would help, but only on one condition: one hundred percent participation — the owner of the school, the faculty, the students, and the students’ parents. All of them. To my knowledge, that was the first time in American educational history such a criterion had ever been required. I was not going to pour effort into helping people only to find that no matter what goes in, nothing comes out the way it should, because no one paid attention to everything else in that young person’s life. Anything less is like taking a terminal cancer patient and spending all your time having a dental hygienist clean their teeth while ignoring the cancer.

They agreed. On my first night, I walked into that auditorium with Dr. Martin Feldman, Dr. Howard Robbins, and Luanne Pennesi, to show them we would be helping on multiple levels. We began with a program of eating healthy foods — and immediately confronted the problem that no one in that room, except the owner of the school, had a healthy diet. The families were plagued by morbid obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic pain, fatigue, and heart disease; it ran through virtually the entire group. So I said: let us get ourselves healthy first. I created a health program, and the student and the parent had to do it together. The teachers had to do it. Everyone had to do it. And they did. To make sure of it, I went out every month to work with them and answer their questions.

Then we looked at exercise, diet, and de-stressing. Many of the parents drank — not to get drunk, but as one way of relieving stress — and many were on antidepressant or anti-anxiety medications. Many had used drugs or alcohol to sublimate the pain of not having the kind of life they deserved. So we built a whole program of detoxification — not just of the foods they ate, but of their neighborhoods, of an entire culture that had grown up on junk food, fast food, the power of advertising and propaganda, and the stigma that says if you are poor and live in the ghettos or the housing projects, you are somehow not worthy of being given opportunities. Historically, they had indeed been deprived of opportunity. But here they were — parents and children alike — determined to show that through meritocracy, focus, discipline, and commitment to higher ideals, they could not only change personally but help influence their entire culture.

I would bring out gigantic truckloads of healthy foods — brown rice, whole grains, nuts, seeds — and we held cooking classes and food-shopping classes. By the end of the year, thousands of pounds of weight were gone from that community, and each person stood up and testified. The one who impressed me most was a girl of about sixteen, who said that she and her mother were so happy — because instead of watching her mother get sicker on more and more medications, she watched her come back to life. Her mother had been on sixteen medications. She was now on none. She had lost all the weight. Her blood sugar was normal. Her blood pressure was normal. She no longer lived in pain. She could walk — she could power walk — and mother and daughter could finally enjoy things together, because her mom could physically move through the world.

And then the information began to flow outward, exactly the way real education always does. The mother’s sisters, who had no children in the charter school, were so motivated by the radical changes for the better that they saw in their sister that they began taking lessons from her. Friends of the students who were still in the public schools began making changes in their own lives, because now they knew someone who could tell them about things they had never known — someone who had been willing to do the homework and study.

The academic results followed. The students earned higher grades and reached greater learning levels than comparative classes in the public schools. The teachers were fit and mentally open, and several of them had transitioned over from the public schools; they said the classroom experience was a thousand times different, and they described what they had left behind — the unruly classrooms, the fights, the absenteeism, the nihilistic outlook of students crushed by what they had to face in the other parts of their lives. One charter student explained it to me and to the whole group: you try to live a civil, decent life, but you live in a building where people are struggling to make ends meet amid a sense of constant existential threat — drug addicts, gang members — and the circumstances you grow up with make everything more difficult. Now that whole environment was beginning to change. This charter school was extremely successful, and the number of its graduates going on to college far exceeded any of the public schools in the United States. I saw what was possible.

A Competitor in Every Pocket

Then, in the last ten years, another competitor entered the classroom and took a seat: TikTok, social media, the social influencer. Teenagers now ride on top of subway cars — and many are killed doing it — because it is the latest thing, and going to the phone every five minutes to see the latest thing has become more important than anything a teacher could possibly say. When we were growing up, the teacher did not have competition for our attention. The system did not have competition. Today, every second of every day, something out there is trying to seize a young person’s attention — and it is almost always something negative.

And when enough young people — people who do not yet know about life or how to navigate it — are being influenced by millions of others staring at the same feed, you get what Brooklyn got: hundreds of students taking a Friday afternoon off to descend on Coney Island to brawl, to fight. You get students taking Fridays off to party as though it were a right. And it became acceptable — because no one changed it, no one challenged it, no one said: if you do not show up to class on Friday, you are expelled.

Today the school systems have become so corrupted by everyone’s influence that there is no consequence for bad behavior, and everyone in the building knows it. The bad behavior used to be a student sitting physically in his seat with his headphones on, listening to music, radiating disdain. It escalated to screaming back at the teacher. Then to beating the teacher — kicking her, smashing her face in. Nothing will happen. It never does. Fighting inside the school, gangs recruiting inside the school — everyone is aware of it, and nothing is being done about it. The teachers have been abandoned. The good parents have been abandoned too — while certain other parents, dysfunctional and mean to the bone, are permitted to come into the schools and threaten or attack the very teachers trying to educate their children.

Let me be clear: this is not to suggest that all teachers or all parents are responsible. Most try to do the best they can. But we have more single parents today than at any point in our history, and a whole generation now believes that you do not need the old family structure — that you can just be a parent, alone, and that is all a child needs. That never works. And instead of dealing with these issues — instead of building into the school system real guidance and counseling for children trapped in toxic home environments, children who carry whatever energy fills that home straight into the classroom, positive or negative — we introduced one of the most pathological, fatalistic ideas ever loosed upon the young: entitlement.

The System Protects the Wrong People

How can any employer be expected to hire graduates who were pushed through by scheme, by scam, by an institution too frightened of its own students to hold a standard? Bring one of these graduates into a small business or a corporation and, soon enough, you will see them on their phones instead of working, doing poor-quality work when they do it at all — and you will be afraid to fire them, because you know you will be the one accused, not them. That fear is not hypothetical. It is exactly what is happening in workplaces across this country right now.

The percentage of teachers physically attacked by students has climbed from 6 percent to 10 percent over the past decade, according to federal data — and verbal threats and harassment toward teachers have nearly doubled since 2009. After pandemic restrictions lifted, reports of physical violence against teachers rebounded to 56 percent, and more than half of teachers now say they intend to resign or transfer because of it. In Los Angeles alone, reported student fights more than doubled in five years — from 2,315 in 2018 to nearly 4,800 in 2023 — many of them staged and filmed for social media, the beatings themselves treated as content. In Atlanta this year, four students were shot at Benjamin E. Mays High School. New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago — pick a woke city, any woke city, and you will find the same headlines: brawls in the hallways, police stationed in buildings that never used to need them, teachers afraid to walk into their own classrooms.

And when someone does something wrong now, increasingly there is no consequence at all. The judicial system in city after city has been reshaped by prosecutors bankrolled by ideological megadonors — George Soros alone has put tens of millions of dollars into electing “social justice” district attorneys across the country, prosecutors who decline to prosecute, who release, who revolve the door. That is not a coincidence sitting next to the collapse of school discipline. It is the same worldview, applied at every level of the system: there must never be consequences, and if there are, they are the fault of whoever tried to enforce a standard.

Look at what that worldview produces on the street. Right now, teenagers are taking over whole streets — racing cars, setting other cars on fire, hurting people. Last week, on a single street taken over this way, two people were shot and another was killed. That is now considered normal. In some cities the police are incapable of doing anything about it, because those are the cities that embraced the movement that says we do not need the police — and that if someone has been arrested, let them go. No bail, no time. In some cases a person has dozens of arrests for violence and is right back out on the street again. This sends one message to the entire community: steal all you want, do all you want, be as mean as you want.

And understand — this is not the majority of students, or homes, or teachers. It is an empowered small segment. But the news operates on a simple rule: if it bleeds, it leads. The most violent acts are the ones the cameras chase. The news never profiles the good parents, the good teachers, the good school environment where a student comes to learn, does so, and becomes an important part of the melding pot of our society. Good news is rarely on the news. Bad news is always breaking.

Meanwhile we medicate the fallout. Roughly seven million American children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and the United States — with less than five percent of the world’s population — accounts for more than eighty percent of the global volume of ADHD medication in circulation. Suicide remains among the leading causes of death for children ages ten to fourteen, and boys are four times more likely than girls to die by it. I went to the largest high school in West Virginia, Parkersburg High, with five thousand students, and I cannot recall a single suicide in all my years there. Something has gone very wrong when we now medicate millions of children for behavior that used to be handled by a parent, a teacher, and a community that actually showed up.

The Entitlement Hustle

A student who feels entitled — entitled to graduate without a single passing score — will carry that entitlement everywhere. Some bring the mentality of street crime directly into the classroom. But do not make the mistake of thinking entitlement is a disease of the poor. Consider who actually feels entitled in America today. Twenty-four million Americans are millionaires — not even counting their real estate — which comes to roughly seventy-four million people in the millionaire class alone. Add another seventy to eighty million Americans in the professional class: not millionaires, minus their real estate, but wanting to be — wanting the same lifestyle, the same advantages, the same entitlements. Add in the professors, the scientists, the CPAs, the lawyers — people with advanced educations generally earning somewhere between $400,000 and a million dollars or more a year. Now you have well over a hundred million people who believe that whatever they are doing is fine, because they have power, they have influence, they have money. A great many of them carry heavy debt too, especially in the professional class — but the self-image holds. For them, everything is gated communities, private clubs, private schools, tutors — anything and everything a parent can purchase for a child, they will.

Look at the college admissions scandal of a few years ago, where the wealthy, including celebrities, paid enormous sums to get their otherwise not terribly bright children into top schools. That was treated as a shock. It had been happening long before. You could pay someone $10,000 to write your master’s thesis, or $20,000 to write your doctoral thesis. You could pay students to sit in classes for you so you never had to attend at all. If you had the money, the system would accommodate you. The whole apparatus has been corrupt for a very long time.

And look at how many times college students are caught cheating. The latest example came just this week: an entire university caught using artificial intelligence to do its work — grades of 100, 100, 100, 100 across the board, which is not humanly possible, and was not humanly done. That is cheating, and it is happening in every university in the United States; we simply refuse to recognize it. There are whole industries out there profiting from making a person seem smarter than they are, handing them an advantage over the students who actually did the work.

So picture two students. One works, does her own homework, asks the right questions, studies. The other does nothing — but is rich, and has artificial intelligence and other people doing everything in his name. Both will walk into the world carrying the same diploma: one fully prepared, one cheating. And in the end, it all comes out — exposed not by the teachers, or the unions, or the influencers, or the entitlement hustlers, but by the workplace. You start screwing up. You cannot do the work. Then you are fired. The workplace is the one examination that cannot be outsourced.

The system, meanwhile, keeps removing every instrument that might tell the truth early. Entrance examinations and exit examinations have been eliminated, because the woke generation decided the scores would make people look bad — would reveal that they were not really that smart, or not that motivated to learn, or not that disciplined. So you take your most undisciplined, most entitled student: he earns a D, and the school gives him a B so that he and his parents can feel better about themselves. And watch what happens when a teacher tries to hold the line. Watch a helicopter mom, a bulldozer mom, a soccer mom confront that teacher: Why did you give my daughter — who is perfect and precious — anything less than an A-plus? You gave her a C. The teacher says: that is what she deserved. No, comes the answer. You don’t know how brilliant she is, how perfect she is. Give her an A, or I will use the power I have to get you fired. That happens every day in America, in schools and in universities. Not all universities, not all schools — we have to make that clear — but far too many.

I have seen where this ends, because I have counseled the casualties. At one point, 90 percent of the people I counseled in a drug-interdiction program I was asked to lead came from wealthy and professional families. They were distraught about the lives they were living and about what they were not receiving. As one of them told me: “My father tried to buy my love, but was never there to give love. Whatever I needed, he gave me through other people. If I was anxious, he would have me in therapy three days a week — but he wouldn’t be there for a meal. He wouldn’t be there for a conversation. He was never there at any point I can remember in my life growing up. He was always busy succeeding. My mother did the same.” When both parents are not there for you, your peers are going to be the ones who guide you — and that never works out right.

So I had the parents come in and sit with their heroin-addicted, cocaine-addicted, Adderall-addicted teenagers. And without exception — without exception — the parents denied responsibility. We gave her everything, they would say. Everything except your time, your attention, your advice, your direction — because you were too busy. She was just a little trophy on your mantle. The truth is that a lot of people have children who should not, and a lot of people do not know how to be good parents. There are simply too many distractions, and so our priorities shift. Shouldn’t we be conducting a whole new accounting of what our priorities must be, if we want a young person to learn the lessons of life in a positive way — the way we all once had the benefit of learning them?

A Profit Mill, Not an Education

So when we ask why our students are failing, we are asking the wrong question. The right questions are: which students are failing? Which schools are failing? Which teachers are failing? And which are succeeding? You have to draw the distinction — the duality. Why do we not pay attention to the ones who are succeeding, identify exactly what went into that success, and then identify exactly what went into the failure? We are not doing that because we are afraid of the answers. The answers would make an awful lot of people look awfully stupid.

And while we are doing our reckoning, let us reckon with how corrupt the higher educational system has become. Harvard sits on an endowment of $56.9 billion — the largest of any university on earth — and still charges students tens of thousands of dollars a year. Why? Yale holds $44.1 billion, the second-largest in the country. Even New York University, hardly in that league, commands an endowment of roughly $6.6 billion. These institutions have accumulated wealth that would allow every student to attend for free, in perpetuity. They do not allow it, because the university has become a profit mill. The whole system is corrupt — every aspect of it — and it is not going to self-correct. At the same time, parents, educators, and concerned people within our society are working to bring back the standards we once had, so that the teacher never has to fear a curriculum that has been politically slanted. They deserve our support, because the institutions will not reform themselves.

The Overstimulated Child: What No One Wants to Examine

There is one more factor, and it may be the least recognized problem in the schools today: the child who walks into the classroom already overstimulated — on caffeine, on sugar, on processed foods. The scientific literature is replete with hundreds of peer-reviewed studies showing that this child is going to have difficulty paying attention and staying focused even if everything else is in order — right intent, good parents, every other box checked. And look at how many of our children are obese. We have had the fattest children in the world.

Compare an American school with a Japanese school. In the Japanese school, the children arrive early and clean the school themselves — every restroom is spotless. The students, not custodians and not contract workers, prepare the lunches, and the meals are based on the traditional diet: fresh fish, rice, beans, starchy vegetables, fermented foods, green tea — all of it health-promoting, none of it overstimulating. The American child starts the day with sugar-coated cereal and moves through a day of processed foods — the diet that has produced the highest rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, and inflammatory conditions ever recorded in children and teenagers.

And then, when Jimmy isn’t learning, we look at the problem exactly backwards. Jimmy must have a brain chemical imbalance, we are told. That theory, by the way, has been completely disproven by good science — it was a fraud; the imbalance never existed — and yet billions of prescriptions for SSRIs were written on the strength of it, drugs which themselves cause the very chemical disruption they claimed to correct, alongside the Ritalin and the other psychoactive drugs we hand out to children. Meanwhile, what would actually work goes untried. How very few children and teenagers start the day with exercise, meditation, a healthy diet, intermittent fasting — so that when they arrive at school, their blood chemistry is in good range and they are able to focus. How many schools offer a meditation class? How many schools teach proper nutrition? That has to be added into the equation as well.

Homeschooling Is the Verdict

Parents are rendering their own verdict on all of this, with their feet. Homeschooling grew at nearly three times the pre-pandemic rate in the 2024–2025 school year, and more than a third of reporting states recorded their highest homeschool enrollment numbers ever — higher even than the pandemic peak. There are now more than 3.4 million homeschooled children in America, nearly double Catholic school enrollment and closing in on total public charter enrollment. That is not a fad. That is a no-confidence vote, cast by millions of families, in the institution this country once trusted more than almost any other.

None of this is true of every school, or every student, or every teacher — and it is important to say so, because the good, attentive, courteous student who respects a teacher is not the one burning that teacher out. It is a small segment who act out, who are never disciplined, who are protected by an ideology that treats every consequence as an act of oppression, who are doing the damage — to their own futures and to everyone else’s. But we have built a system that rewards exactly that behavior with attention, with impunity, with a diploma at the end of it regardless. And we have built a system that punishes the teacher who tries to hold a line and punishes the student who does the work and expects it to mean something.

What message do we imagine we are sending when a student can curse out a teacher, or strike her, or throw her to the ground, and face no real consequence at all? We are telling that child that nothing he does inside a classroom carries weight — and he will carry that lesson with him out the door, onto the street, into the gangs and the mobs and the violence we now see erupting in city after city, night after night. What happens in the classroom does not stay in the classroom. It walks out into the rest of the society, and it is walking out right now.

We are not going to fix this system from within. It will not be reformed by another administrator, another task force, another round of lowered standards dressed up as compassion. It will only change when it collapses entirely under its own weight — and we are watching that collapse happen in real time, city by city, classroom by classroom. The teachers speaking out on that video are not exaggerating. They are the last honest witnesses left in the building, and they are telling you, in their own words, that something is very wrong. I am telling you it is not the youth. It is everyone who was supposed to raise them, teach them, and hold the line — and didn’t.

That is why I grade a small segment of our educational system a D-minus. And that is why I call it what the title of this essay calls it: an existential threat. With exceptions — and the exceptions prove what is possible — our educational system is now producing an entire generation capable of learning all the wrong lessons and misapplying them in the real world. The reckoning will not be delivered by the teachers, the unions, the influencers, or the entitlement hustlers. It will be delivered by reality itself. And reality does not give out B’s for D work.