From Major Bob ‘Von’ Liebman, USAF Ret:
“This American Thinker article by Lars Moeller is the best seen to date (IMHO), detailing the source, nature and broad-based effects of the ‘Big Education’ threat matrix in play against our younger generations; highly relevant to the ultimate problem statement and prospective correction discussed at STARRS.
Also IMHO, the required fix(es) will be much more comprehensive and far-reaching than merely rooting out and preventing Marxism and DEI as institutional tropes.”
By Lars Møller
The American educational system has entered a protracted period of measurable decay, one that began well before the disruptions of 2020 and continues to erode the cognitive foundations necessary for self-government.
Data from the Education Scorecard project, a collaboration among researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth, document a “learning recession” that commenced around 2013–2015.
After two decades of steady gains in mathematics and reading, progress stalled and then reversed. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for fourth- and eighth-graders reveal that the bottom half of the distribution absorbed the heaviest losses, producing the widest achievement gaps recorded in a generation.
By 2024, roughly one-third of eighth-graders scored below basic in reading—unable to locate main ideas or follow the sequence of events in a simple passage.
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results for fifteen-year-olds reinforce the pattern: American reading performance has fallen to multi-decade lows even as other developed nations experience their own setbacks. The top quartile of students has largely held its ground; the lower ranks have cratered.
What emerges is a bifurcated polity in which a thin elite retains competence while a swelling underclass of the functionally semi-literate becomes available for political mobilization.
As might be expected, the grave deficits outlined do not remain confined to the K–12 years. They migrate into the universities, where professors report incoming freshmen who lack reading stamina, the capacity for sustained argument, and elementary quantitative reasoning.
Institutions respond with expansive remedial programs and, more perniciously, with a conspicuous grade inflation designed to conceal the real-world shortfall. Average GPAs climb while the substantive demands of coursework recede.
Public confidence collapses in tandem: only a minority of Americans now regard a college degree as “very important,” a sharp decline from the preceding decade.
The economic bargain between the citizen and the university—high tuition financed by debt in exchange for genuine intellectual capital—has been broken.
Multiple forces converge to produce the alarming outcome. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmic social media after 2010 fractured attention spans and displaced long-form reading.
The 2015 replacement of No Child Left Behind with a softer accountability regime removed external pressure on districts to maintain proficiency standards.
Chronic absenteeism, already rising before the pandemic, became endemic afterwards, severing daily contact with sequential instruction.
Escalating rates of reported “anxiety” and “depression” —nonspecific symptoms of adjustment disorders rather than separate diseases in their own right—further reduced the emotional bandwidth required for rigorous work.
Yet material and technological explanations, while real, leave the deeper cultural transformation unexplained.
The decisive factor, to be sure, is the patient ideological colonization of the educational apparatus itself—the “long march through the institutions” first articulated by Rudi Dutschke, a socialist activist, in 1967 and rooted in Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of “cultural hegemony.”
Gramsci, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party, recognized that Western societies possessed a resilient “civil society” of schools, churches, media, and voluntary associations that insulated the political order from sudden revolutionary assault.
Rather than frontal attack, a winning strategy required the gradual occupation of these mediating institutions by cadres who would reshape the common sense of successive generations.
Dutschke translated the insight into activist practice across the West: enter the professions of teaching, administration, and curriculum design; alter hiring, standards, and content from within; wait. And do not yield an inch once you strike.
Over five decades, the project of hostile infiltration has succeeded with remarkable thoroughness.
Faculties and administrative bureaucracies in education schools and elite universities display near-uniform ideological composition. Viewpoint diversity has contracted to the vanishing point.
Curricula once organized around the transmission of literacy, numeracy, and the historical narrative of Western institutions have been reoriented towards the categories of critical theory: power, oppression, identity, and systemic injustice.
Victor Davis Hanson, classicist and Hoover Institution fellow, has traced the mutation of classical Marxism into its contemporary campus form.
Where Marx focused on economic class, the new orthodoxy substitutes race, gender, and sexuality as the permanent axes of conflict.
The consequence is a pedagogy of permanent grievance that divides students into fixed camps of oppressors and oppressed.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices function as enforcement arms, rewarding ideological conformity and punishing dissent.
Nowadays, rigorous courses in history, literature, and the sciences give way to grievance studies whose primary purpose is the cultivation of affective solidarity rather than analytical competence.
Grade inflation becomes a political instrument: disparate outcomes must be masked lest they challenge the premise that all differences are artifacts of structural bias.
Employers increasingly notice that graduates of once-prestigious institutions arrive deficient in basic skills of reading, writing, and logical inference.
Viewed from a societal perspective, the university’s ancient compact with the public—high cost tolerated in exchange for the production of capable citizens—has been repudiated.
The pedagogical consequence is historical amnesia.
Students graduate knowing little of the institutional achievements that made liberal democracy possible: the English common law, the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on empirical inquiry, the American Founding’s synthesis of classical republicanism and natural rights, the successive waves of reform that expanded those rights without dissolving the underlying order.
In place of that inheritance, they receive a sentimental narrative of original sin and perpetual victimhood. Anti-Western propaganda therefore finds a receptive audience.
Sentimental appeals to equity and inclusion require no command of primary sources or comparative institutional analysis; they require only moral intuition unanchored by historical knowledge—and a youthful spirit of rebellion.
A generation that cannot distinguish the Magna Carta from a modern administrative decree, or the difference between equality before the law and engineered equal outcomes, is cognitively disarmed.
Propaganda fills the vacuum with simplified moral binaries that flatter the unformed self while eroding the capacity for sober judgment.
The ideological drifting of Western academia serves to compound a sense of cultural pessimism.
Universities insulated by tax-exempt endowments and federal student-loan guarantees face few internal incentives to reverse course. Administrative bloat and ideological monoculture reinforce each other.
External pressure—taxation of endowments, conditionality of research grants, expansion of vocational alternatives—remains the only plausible corrective, yet the political will for sustained application is uncertain.
Meanwhile, the pipeline of semi-literate, historically unmoored graduates continues.
A republic that systematically produces citizens incapable of reading its own foundational texts or evaluating competing claims about its past has already begun to forfeit the conditions of its own continuity.
The learning recession is therefore more than a statistical embarrassment; it is the measurable symptom of a deeper civilizational self-denial.
Distinguishing between harmless and harmful cultural phenomena in an open society requires moral judgment and historical insight.
Fundamental to the self-conception of free citizens—and their willingness to make sacrifices for society when it is threatened by totalitarian forces from within or without—is a sense of human dignity, knowledge, and institutional integrity: an understanding of one’s own history and a realistic acknowledgment of the significance of Western civilization in the face of barbarism and tyranny.
What is taught in primary and secondary schools and at universities—at both ends of the educational spectrum—is crucial for the long-term survival of civilization.
Historically, totalitarianism has threatened Western civilization from the outside through military might and threats of annihilation.
More recently, in the revolutionary spirit of Rudi Dutschke, it has crept in as loosely organized groups of activists advocating moral relativism and cultural revisionism—yet all of them wish to see the West collapse in favor of a utopia.
America must reclaim its schools and universities to avoid a painful surrender to barbarism and tyranny.
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