The Ever-Present Panic About America’s Schools
In a thought-provoking edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, The Atlantic revisits historical critiques of American education, revealing a persistent cycle of pessimism regarding the efficacy of K–12 schooling. The article highlights a significant decline in student performance over the past decade, with reading and mathematics scores hitting 25- and 30-year lows. High school students recently recorded their worst average ACT scores since 1990, prompting a renewed examination of educational practices and philosophies. This decline follows a brief period of improvement at the start of the century, leading many to question whether genuine educational progress has ever been achieved in the United States.
The article draws parallels between contemporary concerns and historical critiques from as far back as 1939. James L. Mursell lamented the inability of schools to effectively teach core subjects, noting alarming failure rates in algebra and physics among students. His observations echo modern frustrations, particularly regarding the struggles of college students in mastering fundamental skills. Similarly, Albert Lynd’s 1950 essay, “Quackery in the Public Schools,” critiques the trend of outsourcing curriculum development to elite educational experts, whom he deemed disconnected from the realities of classroom teaching. This historical context reveals a cyclical nature of educational dissatisfaction, where each generation seems to believe that the preceding one has failed to adequately prepare students for the future.
Despite the grim statistics and historical critiques, there remains a glimmer of hope. Lynd, while criticizing the state of education, acknowledged the resilience of the American educational system, suggesting that it has the capacity to survive even the most misguided pedagogical trends. Today, as debates rage over issues like critical race theory and the impact of technology in classrooms, the article invites readers to reflect on the broader implications of these educational challenges. While alarmism may be warranted given the current state of affairs, the enduring spirit of innovation and adaptability in American education might ultimately lead to a resurgence in student achievement. As the nation grapples with these pressing issues, the hope is that history will not only serve as a warning but also as a guide toward meaningful reform.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through
The Atlantic
’s archives to contextualize the present.
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Was there ever a time when Americans believed that kids were actually being educated well? A look back through
The Atlantic
’s archives shows that bouts of optimism are very occasional. I recently joined this long line of pessimists when reporting on the
stunning decline
in educational performance among K–12 students in the United States over the past decade. After a temporary period of improvement at the start of the century, students are now plumbing 25- and 30-year lows in reading and mathematics performance, and high-school students recently had their worst average ACT scores since 1990.
Compare this to James L. Mursell’s
complaint
in 1939 that “in the grand struggle to get subject matter off the page and into the head, the schools are suffering a spectacular and most disconcerting defeat.” He was dismayed that half of the students who took algebra in Iowa failed a basic mathematics test, that physics students failed basic questions of kinematics, and that the time spent learning high-school chemistry turned out to be “an almost total loss” when those students arrived at college. Mursell was also despondent over the state of English education in America. It wasn’t just that students were incapable of writing well, he argued. The problem was that “a great many high-school pupils are not able to discriminate between what is a sentence and what is not.”
Things had not improved terribly much 11 years later, per Albert Lynd, whose essay
“Quackery in the Public Schools”
appeared in the March 1950 issue. Lynd was worried about the attempt to professionalize teaching by outsourcing curriculum development to pedagogical experts sitting in elite universities, the “superprofessionals who determine the kind of education to which your child must submit and for which you must pay taxes.” He ridiculed this field as a haven for “pseudo-scholarship for mental lightweights” and found the new curricula established to teach teachers their craft very wanting, often riddled with grammatical errors.
Many of these critiques feel contemporary. The recent war over the use of critical race theory in schools was really about whether teachers were imposing a radical and harmful curriculum designed by out-of-touch, highly educated elites. And the notion that today’s college students are much less capable than those of previous generations has been examined again and again by my colleague Rose Horowitch, who noted last year that students at
even elite universities
are struggling to read complete books and who recently reported that many students at highly selective colleges have such
low mathematical ability
that they struggle with fractions.
The suspicion that Americans are becoming more illiterate has long been irresistible to the educated class. In the present day, this happens to be objectively true. But across time and cultures, we hear the alarm of declinism: In
Horace’s
Odes
on moral decadence, he observes, “Our parents’ era, worse than their ancestors, bore us still worse, and soon we will give more wicked offspring.” This was written during the reign of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome—not widely considered a dark age. Perhaps the kids have simply never been all right in the eyes of their elders.
U.S. education has in recent years endured many harmful innovations, some launched with good intentions: the
abandonment of phonics education
in favor of “whole-language learning” (which has weakened basic literacy), the abolishment of standardized testing for some university admissions (which has contributed to kids at top universities failing remedial math), and the widespread use of laptops and cellphones in the classroom (which has been a distraction for everyone). I may just be geriatric at heart, but it feels like alarmism is warranted this time.
Still, American education plods on. Toward the end of his 1950 polemic, Lynd worries about the effect that stuffing public schools full of pedagogical “hocus pocus” will have on the country. But he eventually finds a silver lining: “You may draw some comfort from the knowledge that the greatness of this nation lies in its infinite capacity for surviving hocus-pocus!” Hopefully this capacity proves as capacious as Lynd believed it to be.
