The problem with our American education system goes much further back than the last few years or the current generation. For multiple generations, our education system has prioritized socialist theory and leftist politics over useful skills and classical learning, which means that now professors, teachers, and administrators are even more radical and ignorant than the students.
I personally know a number of capable teachers, including individuals who taught kindergarten, high school, and college, some retired and some still teaching. Almost all of them will attest to two issues: that many of the kids are ignorant and ill-behaved, and that the administrators and many teachers are even worse than the students. This is why people who want to solve our educational crisis by giving more money to schools and teachers’ unions are foolish. Giving money to an unqualified, woke, angry activist teacher will simply make that teacher an overpaid, unqualified, woke, angry activist.
We need a massive overhaul of our education system from preschool and kindergarten all the way up through universities. I recommend Booker T. Washington’s model of combining a classical curriculum in history, literature, etc., with science/math and manual labor skills, all held to high standards. The students at his Tuskegee Institute could run rings around most PhDs today — and they were as skilled at carpentry and sewing as at medicine and theology.
Read Also: George S. Patton, Olympic Athlete
The University of California, San Diego asked incoming freshmen a number of simple math problems, including an eighth grade-level equation and a second grade-level addition word problem: “Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?” Between the Covid year 2020 and 2025, the number of students at UCSD, which is considered one of the top American public universities, who did not meet even middle school math standards increased by nearly 30 times, The Free Press reported. This year, 8.5% of incoming freshmen had to take remedial math and another 3.3% had to take a high school-level math class. That means over one in 10 incoming UCSD freshmen were not prepared for college-level math.
The brutal reality is that if you need any remedial classes, you should not be in college. Higher education should not be working to bring in as many people as possible, regardless of their intelligence or work ethic. It should be reserved for the few who can meet the standards. Part of the problem is that now in America we require college degrees for many jobs that simply should not require them, including journalism, business, management, and elementary school teaching. That also needs correction.
But ultimately, UCSD is setting up its students for failure in life, and bringing down the quality of its graduates by allowing in and pandering to large numbers of students who simply can’t hack it. I knew a couple such kids in college, and when they left college, they could not handle the real world and jobs that didn’t offer endless extensions and remedial training. If they hadn’t been nursed along on false expectations in college, they probably could have held jobs successfully.
But let's return to my point about teachers and administrators. An Academic Engagement Network survey this year found that faculty and staff at U.S. universities are driving antisemitism, with 73% of Jewish faculty reporting that they had heard antisemitic statements from colleagues. A 2022 Education Freedom Institute survey found that 84% of educators across America — including in red states — supported Democrats.
Randi Weingarten’s powerful American Federation of Teachers union has dedicated its resources to decrying Donald Trump, pushing LGBTQ and CRT ideology, and targeting anyone who does not conform with woke opinions. Weingarten was also among those principally responsible for keeping schools closed during COVID-19, demanding loads of taxpayer money for reopening (which she didn’t use on reopening), while setting American students back years. We’ve all heard the scandals of school staff secretly gender-transitioning children or helping them obtain abortions.
This is why U.S. students have hit historic low scores in reading and math. It is why huge numbers of American students protest in favor of terrorists and illegal aliens, but are barely literate and can’t do basic addition. America’s educators are overwhelmingly woke, ignorant, radical, hateful, and undereducated, and they teach students to be the same.
