• A rise in ignorance. Despite having immediate access to more information than their parents could have dreamed of, today’s youth increasingly know less about the world around them. On the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment—an international evaluation in math, science and reading for 15-year-old students—Americans scored lower than their peers in Asian powerhouses such as China and Japan and in European allies from the U.K. to Germany.
American universities are subordinating academic achievement to ideology while constricting free expression—the lifeblood of intellectual advancement and prosperity. Teachers unions restrict competition. Knowledge of the past is particularly spotty as schools either down play or distort the nation’s history. The effect is a decline in patriotism and love of country, which loosens the glue of national unity embodied in the motto E pluribus unum.