Education and the American Crisis
A recent report by the University of California, San Diego on its incoming freshmen is rightly setting off alarm bells. According to the executive summary, “over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students—particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills.” Math skills, according to the report, are “below middle-school level” for “one in eight members of the entering cohort.” For those of us in education, the report is surprising—for how bad things have gotten—but not particularly shocking. It’s been clear for some time that we have forgotten how to truly educate our students, and it’s affecting not only their lives but also the culture at-large. Our national pathologies stem directly from this, I’d say. And I’d like to use another country’s approach to education to illustrate this reality.
A quick glance at the national curriculum policy in Kenya is revealing—and also refreshing. The document, updated in December of 2018, suggests there is a deeper purpose to education, one beyond mere job-training. Dr. Belio Kipsang, then the principal secretary for the State Department of Early and Basic Education, writes that the policy “is largely influenced by questions about the nature and kind of society and social system that Kenya wants to become or remain,” and “it defines the content of learning, knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and perspectives that the Kenyan society upholds.” So, for Kenya, education is about passing down and upholding the meaning of the nation.
That becomes immediately clear when looking at the latest literature recommendations put forward by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development. The introduction to the recommendations, published in June, lists one of the goals of education in Kenya as “[fostering] nationalism and patriotism and [promoting] national unity.” It also seeks to “promote individual development and self-fulfillment,” to “promote sound moral and religious values,” and to “promote social equality and responsibility”—in other words, formation. In addition, it aims to develop and respect for “Kenya’s rich and varied cultures,” generate “international consciousness” and “positive attitudes towards other nations,” and to promote good health and “positive attitudes towards environmental protection.” The literature recommendations then discuss a variety of texts—plays, poetry, novels—with the purpose of both furthering what it means to be educated in Kenya and to study these texts for their own sake.
In short, a graduate of Kenyan schools should enter the world as a serious human being.
I mention all of this because I want to point out that what Kenya is doing isn’t revolutionary or new. But it’s something we’ve lost in the United States.
Along with the formation of students, the purpose of education should be the passing on of culture. That’s why education is a two-pronged approach. It begins at home and continues in school. But for some time, we’ve viewed education as something that’s merely transactional—in other essays, I’ve noted that the United States Department of Education frames going to school as a way to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness.” Its end is economic, nothing more.
At the state level, it’s not much better. The “educational vision” of the Massachusetts Department of Education offers platitudes about why people go to school: to “understand and value self,” “to understand and value others,” to “shape their path,” to “be empowered,” to “engage with the world,” and “to feel connected.” These are the kind of vagaries you expect to hear in a calorie-free graduation address, not in a vision statement for a state-level department of education. If that’s how many conceive of education, it makes sense that so many teachers and administrators would follow trends, so as to better “reach” students: adding young-adult novels instead of classics, attempting to “gameify” education, and so on.
There’s the fog of war. Let’s talk about the fog of education. Our detachment from the meaning and purpose of education—from the Latin educare, which means to bring up and train and mold—means we have utterly forgotten why we study certain subjects. The typical American high school offers courses in mathematics, literature, history, science—the liberal arts. And the liberal arts are the liberating arts, meant to free us from our lowest passions and teach us the meaning of being human.
What starts in secondary education doesn’t stay there, though. Universities have decided that a liberal education is no longer profitable, so they’re eliminating entire departments or consolidating them under a single “department of humanities.” Most alarmingly, the University of Chicago, a lodestar for liberal education in the United States, has decided to pause admissions to several of its PhD programs.
These actions have real cultural effects. People don’t know who they are anymore, and they certainly don’t know the meaning of their country and their home. Our culture is increasingly chaotic. And many people appear to be retreating from reality altogether—virtual lives and identities. This will only increase as the prevalence of artificial intelligence grows. Mark Zuckerberg, to cite one such example, has said that, in the future, many people will interact with AI agents instead of real people.
If we want to restore a common culture, a sense of pride in the nation, and a deeper sense of what it means to be human, then it should begin with education. Let’s return to Kenya. Kenya, of course, is a kind of fiction—a nation assembled from different peoples after the colonial age concluded. So the potential for fissuring and violence is high. But that’s why the government there has made it important to have a common culture, pride in the nation, and a sense of formation. Because if people don’t learn to live with each other, and to live well, then they’ll tear each other apart.
So it’s my recommendation, both as a teacher and a citizen, that a future American administration think seriously about education in this country. There should be a commission on education. This commission should consider why it’s important for students to read foundational texts, serious literature, and to think about what it means to be both human and an American. I’m not sure what this would look like or how expensive it would be. But imagine the potential results: rooms of engaged students—of all ages—puzzling over serious texts and ideas, not for transactional reasons but for their own sake. Because they matter.
If we don’t recognize that so much of our pathologies begin and end with education and respond accordingly, then it won’t just be test scores that will be in a state of collapse.