The Social World

Tag: Education

  • The steady erosion of academic rigor in German schools

    The steady erosion of academic rigor in German schools

    German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social-insurance contributions and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards.

    Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, I have learned that challenging students is now frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted. A mathematics teacher tells me that assignments he set 20 years ago for his older students would now be beyond even the brightest. One thing is certain: the children are not to blame.

    The decline began in 1964, when philosopher Georg Picht published The German Education Catastrophe, calling for a drastic expansion in the number of college-eligible high-school graduates. Until then, only those who graduated from a Gymnasium, the equivalent of a selective high school, qualified. Picht’s alarmism found ready ears. In 1960, 7 percent of students left school with college-level results; today, more than half do. The inflation of academic credentials accelerated with the 1999 EU Bologna reforms, which dismantled the traditional and rigorous European degree structure and replaced it with the Anglo-American model. Only medicine and law escaped. The effect has been the slow death of Germany’s once-superb vocational system. Many small- and medium-sized businesses no longer offer apprenticeships but almost anyone who has finished high school can find some comfy course at college. More than 70 German universities now offer degrees in gender studies. It’s dumbing all the way down.

    As college places were massively expanded, the Gymnasien had to lower their entry thresholds to keep pace with the demand for more and more students. Since 2002, in my own state of North Rhine-Westphalia, parents have had the right to choose their child’s secondary school, regardless of their teachers’ recommendations. Children deemed unready for the Gymnasium are admitted and, once enrolled, bureaucratic obstacles prevent them from being moved to a more suitable high school.

    The deterioration has been striking in my subjects. Since 2007, students have been allowed to use dictionaries in English exams, which discourages them from memorizing vocabulary. That same year, the Zentralabitur – a centralized state exam – replaced teacher-written finals. Previously, each school designed its own papers, tailored to what had been taught. Now, vague, homogenized curricula require little factual knowledge. History was replaced by the nebulous goal of “intercultural communicative competence.”

    Objective grading once relied on the Fehlerquotient (number of grammatical errors per hundred words). This was derided as “too rigid,” replaced by an imprecise points system designed to boost marks. Marks are awarded for trivialities, such as “structuring” a text. Students quickly learn the formula: use a few stylistic devices – enumerations, metaphors, repetitions – and you can be seen to analyze anything. Teaching to the test has replaced teaching to think. Real objectivity would require blind marking, external examiners and anonymized papers – none of which exist.

    When I attended a Gymnasium in the 1980s, advanced English students were required to study an entire Shakespeare play. Later, this became selected scenes, then scenes from film versions. In 2023, the Bard was dropped entirely, replaced by the study of “questions of identity and gender.”

    Since 1970, North Rhine-Westphalia has had only eight years of non-leftist control over education. Progressivism now permeates every level. Among teachers, Green sympathies are disproportionately high. Of the 17 newspaper articles used in exams between 2020 and 2025, not one came from a conservative source. The Guardian and the New York Times dominate.

    Behind all this lies the creed of “competence orientation.” Grammar, spelling and factual knowledge are dismissed as obsolete. It is enough to “communicate effectively.” Why, then, read Shakespeare? Why learn a soliloquy by heart? In biology and geography, exams no longer test knowledge but the ability to interpret pre-packaged “material” – charts, graphs and snippets of text. A colleague who marks geography papers believes anyone with common sense and patience has a decent chance of passing.

    Latin, too, has been softened. Translation from German to Latin is banned as it is “too difficult.” Lessons are increasingly padded with Roman culture and history.

    When the state exam was introduced, most teachers welcomed it because it meant less work. I realized something had gone horribly wrong when I graded a history paper by a gifted pupil who provided precise dates, facts and definitions. The new state syllabus allowed only limited marks for such content. I only managed to salvage her grade by awarding her full points elsewhere.

    Across all subjects, measurable trivia has replaced genuine learning. Multiple choice has supplanted multiple perspectives. Today’s “competence orientation” manufactures compliant consumers who consult Wikipedia or ChatGPT for ready answers. To criticize “competence orientation” is near-heresy; every mainstream party endorses it. It was introduced in my state under a Green minister, continued by a Liberal and remains untouched under a Christian Democrat. For the left, it serves egalitarianism; for Liberals, it produces plentiful but pliant employees. The Christian Democrats’ acquiescence is harder to fathom. But the result of all this is clear enough. In 2011, a student of mine wrote at the end of a Shakespeare exam: “Students don’t have to learn any more facts. Studying in this way is boring. Students will die of boredom.” If only I could have given her full marks.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Is our education system radicalizing young men?

    Is our education system radicalizing young men?

    My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present.

    The advertisements for post-secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on “indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers had “this is a safe space” stickers on their doors. The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive, leftist-coded “in this house” and “be kind” variety. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as to the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that room. Progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory. A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before recognizing the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing.

    When it comes to how the teachers behaved, I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my son’s school to explain it. The boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate ones and serve as the accepted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my son’s school are women.

    One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education assistant, and he came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher.” The level of surprise he expressed was as if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways. My son often comes home from school and expresses frustration that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament, are treated as though they were somehow inferior.

    As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive-aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carried out by his more socially developed female peers. 

    To say that the parents’ night for the school band was feminine-coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive, leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God himself and turned into an education program.

    Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11-year-old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. He is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be managed rather than engaged with and taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry – although examples of that exist – it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women. This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is aged six until he graduates from university. 

    It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of social justice. What I want to point out is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11-year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in.

    And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye and deny that any of it ever happened. Making matters worse, these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots. And all this happens during their formative years.

    Now, imagine you are a young white male. You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc.) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.”

    On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

    Then if you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the world’s pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male. While all this is going on a series of scandals (Covid, men in women’s sports, trans kids) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl. Once you understand this, the real question is not, “Why are some young men radicalizing?” It’s more,  “Why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?”

    I am not claiming for a second that the women who make up the majority of teachers have malicious intent. In fact, most of the women I have met in the school system are genuinely doing their best. However, there remains a clear lack of male teachers and male influence in the public school system which heavily contributes to an imbalance in the way that the social environments of public school are constructed.

    To make matters worse, well meaning teachers have been given a curriculum and a set of teaching tools that were designed by leftist activists with a political axe to grind. Many education colleges train teachers to make Critical Social Justice (aka “wokeness”) central to the teaching mission, and to bring social justice concepts into every area of education. Many of the teachers who are the most politically active are merely doing what they were told they were supposed to do when they were students in education colleges, and the result is a system loaded with teachers who believe social justice is central to education and who therefore do their best to do what they were trained to do: teach elementary school kids using Marxist theories of oppression they learned in college. While this doesn’t absolve them of responsibility, it does help explain the problem.

    None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. It is more to explain why young men will attach themselves to any voice willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success. The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men who view them in their present state as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate.

    I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, universities, non-profits, HR departments and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate and Andrew Torba.

    One of the reasons that Jordan Peterson became so popular in 2016 is that he spoke so clearly to the struggles that young men were being forced to go through and he did it in a way that was healthy. Peterson encouraged young men to take responsibility, to make something of themselves, to avoid bitterness, to put their lives together and, once they had done that, make some contribution to the world. Not only did he tell them to make something of themselves, but he told them that they could make something of themselves.

    He told them that they were not evil, racist oppressors who needed to step aside, but that they were men who could and should make themselves into people who could be trusted to make contributions to the world and to take up places of authority and responsibility… and that this was a good thing to do. In essence, Jordan Peterson became the mentor figure for young men on the political right and in the political center. 

    Over the last few years Dr. Peterson has fallen ill and this has left the space for a mentor figure wide open, which a number of influencers are trying to exploit. Influencers with large followings on social media can gain currency among teenage boys quite quickly, and unlike college-aged men (Peterson’s initial audience) high-school boys are far more likely to gravitate towards crass humor than the university lectures Peterson became famous for.

    In order to prevent young men from falling down the Nick Fuentes rabbit hole, we need to make an honest play for teenage boys, and we need to do it in a way that appeals to them on their own terms. Because Fuentes is already doing that, his strength is only going to grow.

  • The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

    The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

    In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer.

    Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority

    Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world. A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is an adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it. This explains the self-assurance and self-regard of the liberal governing classes, their smug certainty of their own superiority and their unconcealed disdain for the uneducated and unlettered masses beneath them, the people Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, calls the “deplorables” – the Republicans, Trump voters and other reactionary ignoramuses, many of whose parents, and their parents before them, voted the Democratic ticket and were rewarded for doing so by the beneficiaries of their votes.

    The result, before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump’s first term in office, can be fairly described as the tyranny of the educated and the intelligent; or, put less politely, the mass-intellectual, a product of the industrialization of liberal education throughout the western world. Sir Francis Bacon understood knowledge as power; power over nature in service to a more comfortable future for humanity. Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is not merely in itself virtue but the one and only true virtue.

    Thus progressive education along narrow and restrictive lines of thought fixed by the adepts is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority: the Church of God Without God, recognized as the institution entrusted by them with the privilege of baptizing in its name the present and future members of the new ruling class, endowed with power and the material rewards that come with power – the new Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It is no coincidence that the logo chosen for Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation should be a bitten fruit, symbolizing knowledge acquired through metaphysical rebellion and power as virtue, whether or not acquired by virtuous means and wielded to moral ends. I read only the other day of a team of American scientists who, working with a human egg and a piece of human skin, have succeeded in creating a human embryo, thus realizing, potentially, the ability of two men to sire a “child” that is, indeed, their own and without genetic contribution from what we used to call “Mother” Nature. (The question of what the life of such a freak would be like never – apparently – occurred to them.)

    Scientific “achievements” like this one are the result of the modern worship of narrow intelligence and the complete neglect of what used to be called “intellect,” a word one scarcely hears anymore. Every child for the past three-quarters of a century at least has been subjected to a so-called “intelligence test”; none to what one might call an “intellect test.” Intelligence and intellect are clearly two critically different things. To the extent that intelligence really is susceptible to accurate assessment (a claim of which I am extremely skeptical), it needs to be far better, and more comprehensibly, understood than it is in modern western technocratic society.

    Intelligence tests are designed to measure the mental capacity of a middle, or upper-middle class, person to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of business, the law, medicine, the sciences and technology generally. Success in these fields certainly requires intelligence but by no means necessarily intellect, which implies a comprehensive sense of the entirety of human understanding and culture and of the relationship and balance between their separate categories, including theology and philosophy, history, languages and the arts and fine arts. Many of the finest minds in one field or the other have been hopelessly incompetent in, and even ignorant of or blind to, the others. Music is an art with a fundamental relationship to mathematics. Nevertheless, who can say how Bach would have scored on an SAT test that included geometry and the sciences? Or Shakespeare? Or Rembrandt? Or, for that matter, Saints Paul and Augustine and Aquinas?

    However that may be, it is a virtual certainty that none of these men would have seen in modern education anything less than a civilizational, moral and human disaster. Descartes has been famous for nearly five centuries now for his maxim, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Christianity has given the world another, and infinitely deeper, one, though so far as I know it has never been formulated succinctly. That is, “J’aime, donc je suis.” It would take a person of intellect – not necessarily one of high abstract intelligence – fully to recognize the profound human truth of that one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • The study of psychology has been a disaster

    The study of psychology has been a disaster

    A young Chinese girl approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study. I knew nothing of her, except that she was pretty, with beautiful dark eyes, and was almost certainly of high intelligence. I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. “What are you interested in?” I asked.

    “I was thinking of history and psychology,” she replied.

    “Ah,” I said, “definitely not psychology, at all costs not psychology.”

    My answer emerged spontaneously, without any reflection – too spontaneously, in fact. I have never entirely overcome my early awareness that I was a child in a world of adults and that everyone around me therefore had more authority than me. That anyone such as this girl should now consider me an authority therefore seemed to me strange; I could hardly credit the idea that in her eyes I might be a sage, or that my answer could play a part in determining her future and that I had a great responsibility to weigh my words carefully.

    For me, our conversation was initially one between equals, a casual encounter such as between people at a party; because I had never fully grown up and reached the awe-inspiring status of the adults of my childhood, I failed to appreciate that a conversation between a 75-year-old man and 16-year-old girl can never be one between equals. “Why?” she asked, with regard to my interdiction of psychology.

    People come to think of themselves as objects rather than subjects, almost as laboratory specimens

    “Because it will turn you in on yourself. It will make you self-obsessed. Most students of psychology want to learn about themselves. It never works. No explanation is ever satisfactory to them. They enter a labyrinth from which there is no return. I don’t know why you want to study psychology, but if it is because you want to find out about yourself, abandon the search straight away – before it is too late. You don’t need to find yourself; you need to lose yourself.”

    I seemed to have struck a chord, for finding out about herself was one of her motivations for choosing psychology.

    “What should I study, then?”

    “Anything that really interests you that has nothing whatsoever to do with you.”

    I retreated slightly from my dogmatism. By now, I realized that I had changed mode, from that of equal to that of guru, and that she was looking at me as a fount of wisdom and truth. Perhaps I would be responsible for having turned her from what would have been a satisfying path in life, a cause of long-term regret. “Of course, if you have other reasons for wanting to study psychology and you are passionate about it, I wouldn’t want to discourage you.”

    But in retreating from my original position, I was not being entirely sincere. For in truth, I believe that the study of psychology, notwithstanding the assistance that it may give in some cases, has been a cultural, and even a psychological, disaster. Not only have these ideas filtered their way down into the general population, but so has the notion that the study of psychology is the best possible way to understand the human predicament. People now turn to psychology rather than to literature for an explanation of the difficulties in living that mankind eternally has. A technocratic solution is the pot of gold at the end of psychology’s rainbow.

    Psychology has the effect of alienating people from themselves. They come to think of themselves as objects rather than subjects, almost as laboratory specimens, or as feathers in the wind of circumstance rather than as contributors to their own lives. I do not wish to deny that featherdom, so to speak, really occurs, but it is not the normal condition of mankind, certainly not in daily life in the modern world. It is both the burden and the glory of being human that our life entails constant and inescapable choice. Psychology supposedly relieves us of that burden, but in the process destroys the glory.

    The desire to avoid the realization that we are often at least the partial authors of our own downfall is an old one, and probably inherent in human nature. Edmund refers to this tendency in King Lear as “an admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star”: in other words, to explain his actions by reference to anything except himself. In psychology, himself ceases to be himself; he starts to talk of himself with pseudo-objectivity; and even the most unimaginative person can come up almost instantaneously with ingenious mechanistic explanations of his wrongdoing when it is necessary or advantageous to do so. I should be surprised if any reader had never in his life made use of this powerful faculty of mind. I should add that no one goes to much trouble to explain his good, kind or generous actions, which do not puzzle him.

    The habit of thinking psychologically – that is to say, with the concepts, however superficially or mistakenly, of psychology – places a distorting lens of theory between a person’s behavior and his explanation of that behavior. He becomes even for himself a mere vector of forces that he is powerless to control: in short, he becomes a victim.

    Of course, in a sense we all think psychologically, and much more is available to us by way of explanation than we customarily employ. Doctor Johnson said, “He who attends the motions of his own mind will find…”: our problem is that we will not examine the motions of our own minds, either from laziness or fear of what we might find there. Dryden said of Shakespeare that “he was naturally learned; he wanted not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inward, and found it there.” Imagine Shakespeare with the spectacles of psychology. Falstaff on the couch; Richard II on Prozac; Richard III in group therapy; Hamlet having CBT. What progress in human self-understanding that would represent.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Mamdani declares war on excellence

    Mamdani declares war on excellence

    New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has a bold plan for the city’s schools: phase out the Gifted and Talented program in elementary education. His rationale is that these programs create disparities and feed inequality.

    It’s a familiar progressive argument. If some students are excelling, others must be suffering. If a child is recognized as gifted, it’s unfair to those who aren’t. The logic is as simple as it is destructive: equality means sameness, even if sameness means mediocrity.

    There is nothing wrong with recognizing giftedness. In fact, it’s common sense. If a child demonstrates unusual ability in math, science, writing, or the arts, you nurture it. You don’t bury it under a misguided notion of “equity.” Excellence, like athletic talent, must be cultivated. No one suggests we should stop training promising young athletes because not every child can make varsity. Yet in academics, this kind of reasoning now passes as justice.

    Mamdani’s proposal rests on a zero-sum view of education: if gifted students are challenged, average or struggling students are deprived. But reality says otherwise. The failure of struggling students has little to do with the success of gifted ones and everything to do with broken leadership, failing priorities and an education bureaucracy that confuses slogans for solutions.

    Worse, eliminating gifted programs doesn’t remove inequality; it cements it. Wealthy parents will always find ways to give their children an edge – through tutoring, test prep, extracurriculars, or private schools. It’s the working-class family, the immigrant striver, the ambitious child from a modest neighborhood, who loses the most when public pathways for talent are shut down. Mamdani’s policy would not reduce inequality; it would entrench it.

    Of course, defenders of his plan will say New York is already taking steps to help struggling students. And to some degree, they’re right. The city has launched NYC Reads, a phonics-based literacy initiative designed to reverse years of damage caused by failed reading instruction. It has trained literacy coaches and rolled out new programs to engage parents. Nonprofits and community groups also step in with tutoring and mentorship programs. These efforts matter – and they are a good start.

    But notice what’s missing. Schools still don’t give teachers systematic flexibility to intervene when students start falling behind across subjects. Mentorship and tutoring programs exist, but they aren’t scaled to reach every struggling child who needs one. And schools rarely celebrate excellence outside the narrow band of standardized tests. A student with a gift for music, or technical trades, or entrepreneurship is too often left in the shadows.

    This is where conservatives can make a real difference: by insisting that fairness doesn’t mean dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It means raising the floor without lowering the ceiling. It means holding onto gifted programs for those who excel, while building new ladders for those who struggle.

    Schools should focus on fundamentals. Every child deserves mastery in reading and math. Early phonics-based literacy and basic numeracy are the non-negotiable building blocks of opportunity.

    Teachers should be trusted and given the flexibility to intervene when a student is falling behind, rather than chaining them to rigid, top-down mandates.

    Families should be engaged. Strong families remain the greatest equalizer in education. Encourage parents to read with children, reinforce discipline, and support homework routines.

    Mentorship and tutoring should be expanded. Churches, civic groups and nonprofits should be scaled up so no struggling student is left without support.

    And excellence of all kinds should be celebrated. Not every child will ace calculus, but some will thrive in the arts, athletics, or skilled trades. Schools should dignify these gifts as much as test scores.

    The tragedy of Mamdani’s proposal is that it reflects a growing cultural fatigue with excellence itself. We live in a moment where fairness is too often defined not by how high the ceiling is, but by how low we can drag it. The logic is perverse: if some shine brighter, then all must be dimmed.

    But dimming the brightest lights does not make the room fairer. It makes the whole room darker.

    Excellence is not the enemy of equity. Real fairness comes when we allow the child who may one day cure cancer to reach his full potential, while ensuring the child who struggles with reading has every chance to catch up. Both deserve cultivation. Both deserve dignity. And both require rejecting the politics of mediocrity.

    New York’s future – and America’s – depends on it.

  • Des Moines school superintendent is not a victim of ICE

    Des Moines school superintendent is not a victim of ICE

    When the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by ICE on Friday, the story startled parents, educators and anyone paying attention to the integrity of our institutions. Dr. Ian Roberts, a man with a final deportation order, allegedly fled law enforcement, leaving behind a vehicle containing a loaded handgun, a fixed-blade knife and thousands in cash. Yet for months, he led thousands of children, set policy for an entire district and enjoyed the prestige and authority that comes with public office.

    The question society must ask is unavoidable: How did someone with an outstanding removal order rise to the top of a school district? How did a man technically in violation of federal law gain the trust of an entire community?

    This is not merely the story of one man flouting the law. It is a story about systemic failure, a window into the erosion of public trust and a lesson about what happens when the rule of law becomes optional. Immigration law is meant to maintain order, fairness and accountability. When enforcement is selective – ignored for some while ruthlessly applied to others – the system itself loses credibility. That credibility is the backbone of a functioning society, yet in Roberts’ case, it was nowhere to be found.

    The first failure lies in bureaucracy. A final deportation order is the result of a legal process that should have barred him from holding public office. Yet somehow, the vetting systems that are supposed to catch such issues failed completely. ICE did not notify the school board, and the board apparently did not discover his legal status during the hiring process. Ordinary Americans face background checks and employment verification at nearly every stage of life. They show identification to get jobs, pay taxes and secure professional licenses. Yet here, in a position of immense public responsibility, the system looked the other way.

    When bureaucracies fail, it is the public who suffers. The lesson is clear: if the government cannot enforce the law at the leadership level, why should citizens expect enforcement anywhere else?

    The second failure is in public trust. Schools are institutions that require adherence to rules, standards and moral leadership. Parents entrust their children to teachers and administrators expecting competence, integrity and respect for the law. If children are told to follow rules while their superintendent ignores one of the most consequential laws in the country, the message is destructive. Hypocrisy at the top does not stay at the top. It trickles down, eroding respect for rules, authority and the social contract itself. Parents should be able to assume that the adults in charge of their children operate by the same standards they demand of everyone else. When that assumption is violated, confidence in the entire system collapses.

    The third, and perhaps most important, issue is selective enforcement. Justice cannot bend based on convenience, identity or social standing. Rules should apply equally to all citizens, regardless of occupation, ideology or demographic profile. Yet in practice, the powerful and politically sensitive are often shielded, while ordinary citizens are held to the full force of the law. That is the definition of selective justice, and it is corrosive to the idea of America as a nation of laws rather than a nation of preferences.

    The pattern is easy to recognize. If a white conservative school leader had a firearm charge and a deportation order, the media and progressive activists would demand immediate resignation. There would be op-eds and social media campaigns insisting on accountability. In Roberts’ case, there is caution, hesitation, even implicit deference. Identity, status and perceived ideological alignment appear to confer immunity. This is not about prejudice; it is about principle. Justice that applies to some and not others is not justice at all.

    Some observers are already framing Roberts not as a man defying a lawful order, but as a victim of ICE. This is identity politics in action: shielding misconduct because the individual occupies a “preferred” category. Conservatives understand that such selective leniency corrodes both public trust and the legitimacy of the law. Excusing wrongdoing based on identity, occupation, or political sympathy is not compassion – it is hypocrisy. And hypocrisy, once institutionalized, becomes a cultural norm, weakening the foundations of governance and public life.

    The Iowa case is a flashpoint, but the lessons extend far beyond Des Moines. First, immigration enforcement must be consistent and credible. The law cannot be optional, or it ceases to function as law at all. Second, vetting and accountability mechanisms in public institutions must be strengthened. Leadership positions, particularly those entrusted with children and taxpayer resources, should not be available to anyone operating outside the bounds of the law. Third, society must confront the corrosive effects of double standards. Parents, students and taxpayers deserve institutions that are honest, lawful and accountable – not institutions that bend the rules for elites or shield them from consequences.

    Dr. Roberts’ arrest is more than a scandal; it is a mirror of the erosion of authority in public institutions. Selective enforcement teaches children and adults alike that rules matter only when convenient. It undermines respect for leadership, weakens bureaucracies and erodes confidence in the system of laws meant to protect everyone equally. Conservatives understand that respect for the law is the foundation of liberty. When that foundation cracks, the consequences ripple through every corner of society.

    This is the real story from Iowa: a superintendent detained by ICE should be an anomaly, a cautionary tale about the consequences of ignoring the law. Instead, it reveals a pattern in which rules bend, oversight fails and selective justice becomes normalized. America cannot survive as a nation of laws if enforcement is optional, particularly for those in positions of authority.

    Until these principles are restored, public trust will continue to erode, and the next child, parent or taxpayer will see that rules matter only if you are powerless enough to be held accountable.

    Dr. Roberts’ case is a stark reminder: justice that applies only to some is no justice at all. Until the law is enforced consistently, America’s institutions – schools, government agencies and the legal system itself – will continue to crumble under the weight of favoritism, bureaucratic failure and selective leniency.

  • Why America’s schools are failing

    Why America’s schools are failing

    It seems that every few years America rediscovers that its children can’t read. In 2024, only 30-31 percent of eighth graders were deemed proficient in reading, and our numbers in history and math are even worse. Since 2020, no state has reported improvement across subject areas.

    It’s tempting to blame “the pandemic” for these declines, but in reality, Covid only accelerated trends that were already underway. For decades before 2020, US students were struggling to reach proficiency, and the truth is that the problem isn’t today’s culture-war skirmishes over pronouns, politics and school closures. It’s the more mundane question of how children are taught to read, to count and to remember.

    Let’s take phonics, for example. Until the 1980s, most teachers were trained to teach students how to read through linking letters to sounds. Taught this way, students learned rules for decoding words, so that they could sound out new words independently. The emphasis was on systematic, sequential instruction, memorization, and drilling. So if a student saw the word “cat,” they would sound out each letter and apply the process to words like “bat” and “mat.”

    But by the 1990s, most teachers were trained more heavily in whole language models, which are mechanisms used to teach students to read words and sentences as a whole, focusing on context and meaning. Taught this way, students would see the word “cat” in a sentence, and would guess the word based on the context of the sentence, or based on a picture of a cat near the word.

    By the late 2000s, though some states resisted, the whole language model was the norm in many elementary school classrooms. There was criticism early on, leading to some “balanced literacy” programs promising to blend whole language instruction with phonics, but in reality, “balanced literacy” usually just meant sprinkling in a few phonics lessons while relying on context guessing. Soon the science piled up, and decades of research showed that a heavy emphasis on systematic phonics is necessary for a child to learn how to read.

    As states began to reinstitute phonics requirements, they realized that the teaching pipeline was stuck. Education professors were trained in whole language and balanced literacy, and taught new teachers in the same manner. Major curriculum companies also had a strong influence on what districts adopted, and had built hugely profitable programs with balanced literacy at their core. Teachers pushed back on a personal level too – no one likes being told they’ve been wronging students they care about for the entirety of their careers.

    But it wasn’t just phonics and reading proficiency – similar issues showed up across educational subjects. Traditional math was standards and drill-based, emphasizing structure and singular proven methods to solve equations, but between the 1990s-2010s, new “constructivist” math allowed students to invent their own strategies with minimal direction. In the same way, traditional civics & history, which was characterized by memorizing facts and dates, was replaced with more sourcing-based lessons that ask “how do we know?” rather than “what do we know?”

    The problem leading to these shifts was, in fact, ideological, but not in the way we usually think.

    In the 1960s, The Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War, and technological advances led to a widespread distrust of authority and tradition. Old ways, hierarchies and one-size-fits-all approaches began to be seen as oppressive, leading to a movement in the world of education that centered around the individual child and his or her self-expression, creativity and discovery. Memorization and drills soon became seen as not suited to a free, modern child, for whom education was supposed to serve in their process of self-actualization.

    “Knowledge,” after all, is socially constructed, and there is no single “right” process for a child to learn. At least that’s what the educational sphere began to believe, which led to phonics rules, historical timelines, and math formulas being viewed as impositions on the child – mechanisms to inhibit equity. As a child learned to read, whole language models fit better with this world-view than did phonics drilling. Many young teachers were taught that old ways of learning like phonics could be harmful to the child because it was a power-based and limiting model.

    This, then, is the pattern of the past 60 years of education: evidence-based basics like phonics, arithmetic and historical fact began to be treated as old-fashioned, and more progressive models, emphasizing meaning-making, creativity and individuality without a solid foundation became the norm. Student outcomes declined and critics called for a return to the fundamentals, but the corrections came abruptly, and teachers are now caught between what they know how to teach and what they’re suddenly expected to do.

    Those blaming declining educational quality on ideology, then, are right in one sense. Not because most teachers today are ideologues, but because they teach as they were trained in programs heavily influenced by an ideology that rejects truth. Modern parents aren’t fleeing public schools because they’ve discovered a latent love of flashcards and homeschooling, but because they believe they can teach their kids more efficiently than the modern public-school teacher.

    Yes, some teachers push their own politics, and that’s a problem. But it’s nothing compared to a system that treats phonics, arithmetic, and historical facts as relics. Kids can’t read – not because of one activist, but because an entire generation of educators was taught to doubt the very idea of right and wrong answers.