Commentary

I spoke with an intelligent boy of 12. His first grade was essentially cancelled and replaced by Zoom, even gym classes. Nothing happened really other than isolation, disorientation, and developmental delays.

His second grade was marked entirely by intense compliance: forced masking, distancing, Plexiglas, making all language lessons useless. In any case, this is what he remembers. He was repeatedly in trouble for letting his mask slip beneath his nose. The school marked him as a problem student.

His third grade was routinely interrupted by class quarantines and disease paranoia. Students were beyond restless and teachers saw themselves less as mentors than cops on the beat, surveilling everyone for misbehavior and signs of ADHD. A positive diagnosis resulted in pressure for drugs to fix the problem.

By then, nearly everyone was academically behind, trust in authority shattered, and organic social networks only starting to form in halting ways as parent groups were wrecked by woke and trans political arguments. No one liked anyone else.

This is the childhood he experienced, along with millions of others, an entire generation. This was the childhood he will carry with him always. This hellish life was created for him by adults, experts, a cowed medical profession, and a media apparatus that pushed draconian controls over all rationality.

It was also the period in which smart parents figured it out. Forced to homeschool, they got a close look at the curriculum and methods. It was nothing but teaching for the test. The test was infused with politics. Their children were being treated not as ready learners but patients in need of medication and indoctrination.

It was here that millions of parents decided to secede from the system to save their kids. Between 1.2 million and 1.8 million kids have been pulled from the public system, perhaps as many as 5 percent of the population. Schooling outside the conventions is up 10 percent.

Meanwhile, fulltime homeschooling, extremely rare 50 years ago, is now the method of 3.4 million kids, or roughly 6 percent of school-age children. That is a net gain of roughly 1.9 million students relative to the 2019 baselines. Homeschooling is still growing at about 5 percent a year in states that report data—more than double the pre-2020 rate—and many states have posted all-time highs.

Even if parents still use the schools—they pay for them with taxes, families cannot afford private schools, and the private schools are full anyway—they no longer trust and do most real education on nights and weekends.

What these trends point to is the biggest upheaval in educational practices in more than a century. It signals the massive failure of the system built over such a long time. The public school system was once the pride and joy of Progressive ideology, the first massive experiment in the public provision of something so essential. Now it seems to be in a relentless state of collapse.

It’s hard to fathom how the partisans of public schooling could have allowed this to happen. I was gobsmacked in 2020 when the school closures hit. I knew for certain that this would shatter public confidence. After all, these people were not getting refunds on their property taxes. How is this not outright robbery and betrayal of the people? Then it got worse with the mandates for a shot that was not needed, was not effective, and was not safe.

Just astounding. Even now, there is no accountability for this period. Indeed there is very little talk about it in the nation’s press at all.

The boy I mentioned at the outset had one kind of terrible experience shared by millions. But a version of that hit everyone in school from all primary grades all through college. Two years of proms were cancelled. The bands and choirs could not meet. The chess clubs went to Zoom. The robotics clubs did not meet. The sports teams packed with ambitious athletes went on hiatus.

Two graduating classes in high school and college held no ceremonies. Those that did most often masked up. Online classes became normalized, as did pass-fail grading standards. Then cheating became nearly universal as students discovered that AI could do their homework and write their papers. What, after all, is the point of learning if everyone is being scored based on the work they tell machines to do?

There were dark times back in the day when college kids, paying 50K–75K per year for education plus room and board, were locked in their dorm rooms. They were later only allowed to attend classes if they got the shot that was, again, not necessary, effective, or safe. This was a betrayal of students, parents, professors, and alumni.

And, like clockwork, the data is pouring in about the value of college itself. The wage premium for having a college degree just took the biggest hit on record. The rates of hiring for high school students are actually higher right now than among college graduates. Before 2001, young high school graduates left unemployment more slowly than college graduates (41.2 percent versus 47 percent per month), but they now exit faster (41.5 percent versus 37.1 percent), after a drop of nearly 10 points for the college group.

Meanwhile, the gap in unemployment between college and no college has shrunk to its lowest levels in 30 years.

This is certain to intensify because employers have come to realize that most degrees point to nothing in particular about the student’s competence. It’s being slaughtered by two major forces: AI and DEI. A degree from a tiny liberal arts college that uses oral examination and bans AI is likely more valuable than a sinecure degree from an Ivy League school.

Meanwhile, nearly every professional line of work absolutely requires advanced certification, programs that preserve rigor and are not afraid to fail students. These tests require real study and real mastery, and deploy intense methods to find out who is who. They are unforgiving, as anyone who has been through them knows. Anyone who believes that a college degree alone gains you a ticket to success is finding out otherwise.

The biggest cost to college is the time lost in which you could otherwise be gaining valuable skills and experience, standing out from one’s peers. Speaking to highly successful men who decided to forego college entirely, they report that it seems unusual at first, even somewhat impressive, but by the age of 30 absolutely no one cares either way.

For decades now, I’ve wondered when the turning point would come. It has apparently already hit PhD studies. Allysia Finley has documented that “recent doctoral recipients enter a saturated academic labor market and struggle to find work. Hiring freezes at universities have further limited academic job opportunities. ... The unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds with doctorates (3 percent) was the highest for any August, with the exception of the pandemic, since the 2009 financial crisis.”

Their salaries are tumbling too as enrollment declines. The unstated truth is that the people signing up for PhDs have low opportunity cost. They have no marketable skills so why not tap loans, government grants, and family money to delay real life as long as possible? In other words, a PhD is becoming a contraindicator of skill and intelligence, just as it had become in the old Soviet Union.

The upheaval hits the entire structure of production from the highest levels to the earlier years. We read that 83 percent of districts have seen declines in reading and math skills over ten years. That’s just the start of it.

When will parents come to realize that 5th graders a century ago were more literate and competent in math and elocution than most college graduates today? And why might that be? It’s because standards have slipped so much while methods have proven faulty as compared with much older teaching styles.

Consider what happened to the habit of memorization, a skill in which young kids can excel. Schools once pushed memorization plus recitation: multiplication tables, spelling lists, state capitals, dates, poems, speeches, psalms. Young children have the capacity to store up material that later reasoning power can deploy. Progressives said it needed to end. Kids were robbed. They are still being robbed.

That’s just the start of the loss. We see the results today as full-grown adults barely form sentences and are alarmingly barren on matters of history, logic, or humanities knowledge. We seem to have reached rock bottom, at least we can hope.

How did we as a society come to forget that civilized people are not created organically from biological processes alone? They must be raised, generation by generation, by intelligent pedagogy, rooted moral example, and hard-won experience. The process by which society came to abandon all of this is a story of arrogance, pretense, entitlement, and sophistry.

However, I’m deeply optimistic today. There is a growing undercurrent of parents and kids who reject it all in favor of old-world texts and standards. That is where the rebuilding takes place, one homeschool or classical academy at a time. It’s happening out of the public eye. It’s this generation that will build a bright future.

Education in Upheaval