Today’s educational crisis began when progressive educators decoupled learning from truth and moral growth, which is why the only way to make education excellent again is to return to the Western teaching tradition that came before.
There is something seriously wrong with education today. Broadly speaking, too much of education has shifted from enlightening students to indoctrinating them. Instead of cultivating intellectual virtue, many institutions promote political activism and ideological conformity.
This focus has produced significantly negative consequences.
Declining test scores, from pre-K through higher education, affirm that the educational system has failed many of our students.
The deficit is in student intellectual development, despite the heroic efforts of most teachers, administrators, and institutions working hard to educate students against incredible odds.
There’s another issue at play: a rigid, top-down, assembly-line model of education. While this model might create unity or conformity, it comes at a cost.
Such a bureaucratic system stifles motivation, initiative, incentive, invention, and even morale. Worst of all, it can severely limit the favorable impact of the classroom as a laboratory of ideas.
So how did we get here?
The genesis of today’s educational crisis can be traced to several primary sources.
What Is Education Really?
Before we move forward, we must take a step back and define education and its true purpose. The English word education derives from the Latin word educatio, which means bringing up. The underlying concept behind education is that it is a systematic method that leads to the discovery of truth and knowledge.
That process can take many forms — formal academic study, vocational training, self-directed learning (autodidacticism), online instruction, and even a combination of these methods.
Education therefore is both formal and informal.
Philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001) wrote in Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary that “becoming a generally educated person is a life-long process.” His sagacious words give us something worth pondering: What has happened to that lifelong process called education?
In the early years of our republic, the Founders subscribed to the classical understanding of education as a “bringing up.” They believed that the discovery of truth and knowledge formed the cornerstone of education and shaped individual character.
In his essay “Four Pillars: Educating America,” Dr. Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, wrote that the Founders believed that a liberal education “should serve to cultivate moral and intellectual virtues” and “was the road to good living, good citizenship, and good statesmanship.”
A good education then makes the citizen moral, knowledgeable, and capable of thinking critically and contributing positively to society. What’s more, an educated citizenry helps preserve liberty.
Why was this so important to the Founders?
First, they believed that moral and intellectual growth led to happiness — what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, or flourishment. For a person to flourish, they must be exposed to the two elements that make it possible: moral and intellectual development. As newly elected President Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to the minister and biographer Mason Locke Weems in 1801,
“I believe firmly with you in the strict connection between virtue and happiness, that the latter cannot exist where the former is not…virtuous habits are produced by exercising the mind in reading and contemplating good moral writings.”
Second, the Founders understood that a citizenry steeped in moral principles and trained in critical thinking was essential to preserving a free republic. Without these virtues, access to God-given natural law and natural rights could be jeopardized.
Horace Mann (1796–1859), an early American educator, once wrote, “Education…is a great equalizer of conditions of men.”
Education, therefore, leads to equality of opportunity, a cornerstone of the American experiment in liberty. These ideas defined the parameters of a liberal education until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What changed? Education became influenced by three major engines of change, ideologies that redefined its purpose: progressivism, postmodernism, and Critical Theory.
Progressivism
Progressivism began to take root at the dawn of the 20th century, championed by American political writer Herbert Croly (1869-1930), educator John Dewey (1859-1952), and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), who started his career in education, first as a university professor and then moving up to become president of Princeton University.
The philosophy they pushed emphasized socialist economic and political ideas, including equality of outcome. Progressivism rejected the ideals of the Founders, especially belief in God-given natural law and rights, moral development, and equality of opportunity. They argued that society had become too complex for ordinary citizens to properly govern themselves, and thus, problems should be addressed by “experts” through the administrative state.
In My Pedagogic Creed (1897), John Dewey wrote down these progressive principles:
- “School is primarily a social institution.”
- “Education…is a process of living and not preparation for future living.”
- “Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”
For Dewey, education existed to shape social reformers, not to cultivate moral and intellectual virtue.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism, the prevailing philosophy in academia today, denies absolute truth. Expressed another way, truth is regarded as relative, something defined by the individual or the collective.
Its roots can be traced to philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), and Michael Foucault (1926-1984). Their ideas took hold in Western thought in the late 20th century and continue to dominate educational institutions today.
Critical Theory
Critical Theory originated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany. The institute, unofficially called the Frankfurt School, was an organized and coherent movement of diverse leftist scholars, including Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). These scholars sought to apply Marxist philosophy and principles to broad historical and social analysis.
Associates of the Frankfurt School fled Germany amid the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Many scholars ended up teaching at prestigious American universities, most notably New York’s Columbia University, where their ideas germinated and then metastasized.
Unlike the Founders, who believed that free men are not equal and equal men are not free, Critical Theory teaches that disparities are always rooted in injustice, not merit. Thus, the Marxist concept that one is rich because another is poor and one is poor because another is rich lies at the heart of Critical Theory.
Critical Theory then is a systematic structure of inquiry that assumes widespread social and cultural injustices. This assumption became the basis by which history and society are re-evaluated, such as the underlying assumption common among leftist scholars today that America has been a fundamentally racist and sexist society since its start.
Critical Theory is opposed to the more traditional fact-driven, empirical approach of dispassionate and unbiased discovery that assumes no preexisting conditions, or the scientific method of inquiry derived from the empirical approach of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Critical Theory also involved processes through which institutions would be infiltrated and then transformed by leftist radicals.
And in more recent years, Critical Theory began evolving into Critical Race Theory (CRT), wokeness, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which are all rooted in the Marxist belief that inequality equals oppression.
The Fruit of These Engines
The collective fruits of these educational engines of change can be seen in the abysmal test scores of our fourth and fifth graders, as revealed in the United States Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2024. Overall, reading scores are down nationwide and math scores are at a historic low.
Although the residual effects of the pandemic might explain part of this recent decline, it cannot explain a downward spiral overall. Indeed, as the NAEP reports, “our education system continues to fail students across the nation.”
As of 2025, the United States’ education system is rated 31st among the nations of the world. This in spite of the fact that the United States spent $720 billion dollars on education in 2024 at the federal, state, and local levels, or an average of approximately $14,840 per student.
Reflecting on the significance of those numbers within a broader historical context, consider Plato’s Academy (founded 387 B.C.) and Aristotle’s Lyceum (founded 334 B.C.). Both were focal points of learning in the ancient world, especially in discovery of knowledge and critical thinking.
Adjusting for inflation (if possible), the operating budgets and administrative bureaucracies associated with these two institutions must have been miniscule in comparison to those associated with education today.
Aristotle’s Lyceum even focused on what was called the peripatetic method of teaching, walking along a path in the woods while engaged in scholarly dialogue with students…literally on a shoestring (sandal) budget! Yet, nearly 2,500 years later, the world still marvels at that pedagogical accomplishment.
In the Western tradition, from the ancient Greeks and Romans down through the historical Church and the Enlightenment, education has focused on the discovery of truth.
The Existential Challenge
Today, there is an existential challenge to this fine educational tradition. That challenge rejects the existence of absolute truth and its discovery. Truth is seen as relative, not absolute.
Education is no longer driven by intellectual and moral imperatives and interests but by so-called social justice. Education is also dominated by a highly centralized, top-down bureaucracy accountable to no one.
In the meantime, problems stay unresolved and in many cases have grown worse, all while our students remain undereducated and in many ways miseducated and even uneducated. This has happened because the discovery of truth and moral and intellectual growth appear not to have happened.
That has consequences because, as Adler noted in The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, “No one can be an educated person while immature.”
The Way Back
John Adams wrote in 1765, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”
Consider Adams’ words in contrast to the educational ideas of John Dewey and others, who believed the goal of education was collectivist social activism and conformity. These ideas are diametrically opposed.
Adams saw education as indispensable to liberty. Dewey sought to shape a new socialist man, borrowing from the old Soviet phrase, the new Soviet man.
Now, we will examine options for improving education beyond the obvious: that socialist collectivism must be rejected in favor of a return to classical liberal education.
These options fall into four broad categories — autodidacticism, administration, constructive activism, and school choice.
Each can be considered independently as part of a broader interconnected strategy for improving education. They are also not necessarily mutually exclusive and more may emerge through reflection.
Autodidacticism
Autodidacticism refers to self-learning, or self-education. As Adler explained, “Education is a lifelong process which schooling is only a small but necessary part.”
Consider his insight. Most adults experience about 12 years of formal education, typically limited to nine or ten months per year. Much of that occurs during childhood, when intellectual maturity is still developing.
College graduates have a little more formal education, with junior college graduates (associate’s degree), undergraduates (bachelor’s degree), and most graduate school alumni (master’s and doctorate’s) getting another two to eight years of formal education.
Since the average adult will live several decades beyond formal schooling, at least part of the time could be dedicated to self-study (autodidacticism).
Self-study can take on several forms: independent reading, writing, research, and listening to educational media (e.g. podcasts, CDs, lectures on television and/or radio). Attending lectures and seminars, taking free online courses, and discussing erudite issues with friends might also be activities that advance learning within the broader context of autodidacticism.
Thomas Jefferson serves as an example — an avid reader who owned thousands of books and studied subjects like science, philosophy, religion, political theory, agriculture, medicine, and geography. He read in Greek, Latin, Celtic, French, Welsh, and English, continuing long after his graduation from the College of William and Mary.
Jefferson should inspire us all.
Ultimately then, we are most responsible for our own education, not government schools or universities. If education in America is failing, we must consider whether we are partly to blame.
In his essay “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” English philosopher John Locke observed:
“Reading imparts knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read, ours.”
Autodidacticism therefore involves not just reading but thinking as well. The two together enable discernment of truth from error.
So, what then should we read and study?
The Founders emphasized subjects that cultivate moral and intellectual growth, encourage critical thinking, and refine communication skills. Together, these are the educational resources that help create a good citizen of a classical liberal (as opposed to tyrannical) constitutional republic, the Founders believed.
So imagine learning directly from Aristotle, Cicero, Martin Luther, Augustine, Frederick Douglas, Milton Friedman, and many more — all from the comfort of your home and on your schedule! That is all possible with a little curiosity and a lot of self-discipline.
Administration
Administration refers to formal education and the formal bureaucratic structures that handle curricula development, pedagogy, resource allocation, and oversight.
In education, there are three main levels of administration: national, state, and local (e.g. city, town, county and/or parish).
The U.S. Department of Education (DoE) at the federal level was established in 1979. It administers federal financial aid, conducts education-related research, transfers money to the states, and makes recommendations on educational reform. According to usafacts.org, the DoE spent $268 billion in FY 2024.
Then there are the states. In 2024, Virginia, for example, spent $9.3 billion for PreK-12 schools. Local educational administration is handled by the executive leadership staff, school boards, and individual school administrators.
At all three levels — federal, state, and local — educational bureaucracies are also vehicles by which to advance administrative interests (including the teachers’ unions) and enforce educational dogma developed by revisionist educational theorists — ideas that can often be traced to John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, and others.
What has this produced?
First, it proves that money does not fix education. Second, it reveals that the current system of education does not educate but indoctrinates.
According to worldpopulationreview.com, the United States now ranks 31st in educational quality among the nations of the world — despite being the most affluent nation in history.
Overbearing bureaucracies have also stifled innovation and healthy competition. Top-down bureaucracies have paved the way for turning education into a social experiment focusing on social justice (thanks to Dewey and his progressive idealogues), not the discovery of truth.
In response, the Trump Administration has vowed to end the U.S. Department of Education. If successful, it could unleash healthy competition among the 50 states for developing better ways to educate our students.
Imagine: 50 laboratories of education, all competing to teach children more effectively and more cost-efficiently.
In the quest for a more streamlined and respectful administration, a critical role for voters lies in supporting those politicians who also see a compelling need to make education less of a social experiment, less costly, and more efficient.
Constructive Activism
In addition to supporting politicians who favor positive educational reform, getting involved with local school boards is a possibility.
That works especially well. I know from firsthand experience.
Several years ago, one of our local school boards was dominated by former educational administrators. As expected, the emphasis was on top-down administration, social justice, and the like. Over time, the former administrators were replaced by citizens who were not educational careerists. Eventually, even the school superintendent was replaced by a new administrator who rejected progressivism in favor of views more sympathetic to traditional classical education.
Whereas our current educational system may have come from top-down, reform must now come from the bottom up.
School Choice
School choice continues to gain momentum. In 2024, there were 75 school choice programs in 34 states, with 18 of those states offering education savings accounts (ESAs), according to the America First Policy Institute. So far in 2025, 16 states have created new or expanded existing programs, according to reporting by the National School Choice Awareness Foundation.
School choice empowers parents with the ability to send their children to the school they judge will offer the best educational opportunities and fit for their child.
Under school choice, the parents decide, not administrators, educational theorists, politicians, social activists, or teachers’ unions. The result promises to be a blossoming of education — once again through the compounding magic of healthy competition. When schools have to excel in order to attract students — and not wind up a failure — they end up being more innovative in their ideas and more efficient with their resources, ultimately attracting and fostering higher quality teachers and administrators and then higher quality students. Thus, the pursuit of excellence breeds success, which fosters even more excellence.
Conclusion
These reforms are not a panacea, but together they do promise to recalibrate education onto a more enlightening trajectory.
In sum, we should view education as a moral and intellectual good, one that provides knowledge; critical thinking skills; moral examples and teachings of the good life; and instruction on how to become a productive citizen within the context of a liberal constitutional republic.
We should also view recent educational initiatives for what they are — progressive, postmodern, Critical Theory programs that are at variance with the Western tradition of education.
That Western tradition includes both secular and Judeo-Christian ideas. Indeed, knowledge, truth, happiness, natural law/natural rights, and even education itself are concepts that have been influenced by the classical Greek and Roman thought, the British literary and legal traditions, and the philosophies of the American Founders, as well as the Church, including such great minds as Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther.
Foremost, classical liberal education focuses on intellectual and moral growth. That concept originates with the Judeo-Christian tradition of seeking truth, leading a moral life, and increasing in knowledge — especially knowledge of God.
Philippians 1:27, NIV, commands, “Whatever happens, conduct yourself in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”
And 2 Peter 3:18 says, “But grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
So, in the end, educational reform will bring us back to our roots — and those roots will give our children wings.
As seen in this article, many K-12 schools now embrace the secular woke agenda and are hostile to Christian beliefs and parental rights. Fortunately, parents don’t have to settle for this. Liberty University Online Academy is a K-12 program designed to educate your children in the ways of the Lord while preparing them to stand firm in their faith when they graduate. Our flexible online curriculum ensures that your student is trained at your convenience and keeps YOU the ultimate educator of your children.
