Education: How to Destroy and Reconquer
Editor’s Note – This essay was excerpted from Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, published by Encounter Books.
August 4, 2023
By Arthur Milikh, Scott Yenor
Perhaps nowhere have the Right’s failures been more consequential than in American education. In America’s public schools, children are often taught to despise themselves and their country. Our history is distorted. Our constitutional traditions trashed. Through our textbooks, our literature and heritage are ignored or rendered ugly; through “comprehensive sex education,” students are encouraged to transition genders, and are manipulated and exploited; through “anti-racism” doctrines, now renamed “culturally responsive pedagogy,” students are taught whites are inherently evil and racist. No country can countenance, much less subsidize, schools that destroy a decent social fabric.
This moral corruption is only part of the story. American schools were once competent at the basics. Foreigners came to America to study, and to copy our infrastructure, from high schools to flagship state universities. Our system generated the talent required to sustain our scientific infrastructure, so critical to our prosperity and international competitiveness. That era may well be over. Today, about 55 percent of all students taking the Graduate Records Exam for graduate school in math, computer science, and engineering are foreign nationals. Astoundingly, America ranks fifth among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in total education expenditures, but only twenty-fifth in math proficiency among early-stage high schoolers and lower in other areas. American taxpayers are foolishly funding a system that produces unseriousness and inability.
As stated in Nation at Risk, a report commissioned at the onset of the Reagan administration: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The situation is even worse today. The Left controls the real levers of power in education – the teacher preparation programs, the curriculum business, the accreditation programs, the state departments of education, the US Department of Education, the teacher’s unions, and the professional organizations. The Left also controls the moral high ground and thus the teaching narrative.