When people talk about war, they picture overseas battlefields, not elementary school hallways. But America is embroiled in a civilian crisis – a war that’s quietly destroying children’s brains and our future.
The battleground is our public school system. The casualties are the minds, dreams and potential of an entire generation.
Leaving aside the tremendous indoctrination in our country’s schools in the alphabet (LGBTQIA++) ideologies, the actual alphabet has suffered. Over the past century, America’s literacy rates have cratered. A new study flags that 28% of U.S. adults perform at the lowest literacy level – around third-grade reading level. Worse still, the share of adults reading below a sixth-grade level clocks in at around 54%.
Our kids fare even worse. NAEP reading scores dropped in 2024 – fourth- and eighth-graders lost two more points since 2022, deepening a trend that began before the pandemic marking the lowest reading proficiency in 32 years.
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That’s not a blip – it’s a nosedive. The fallout: weaker critical thinking, poorer job prospects and citizens unable to parse even basic news headlines.
And while we’re losing ground in literacy, we are paying a lot more money. Inflation-adjusted revenue for K–12 rose about 25% per student from 2002 to 2020. In 2020–21, public schools spent a whopping $16,280 per pupil, culminating in a staggering $927 billion overall.
What a waste! The extra money built the bureaucratic administration while learning outcomes declined. It’s like upgrading your Ford to a Ferrari with no engine.
Despite billions spent on tech to teach literacy, reading is plummeting. Only 42% of 9-year-olds and 17% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure “almost daily.” This marks the lowest in 40 years. We gave them Kindles and Chromebooks but forgot to court their curiosity.
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One in three eighth-graders can’t read a textbook well enough to pass a history quiz. And that’s just “basic,” which isn’t what basic used to be, either. Indeed, the “educators” degraded the very word “proficiency” so they could pile a bunch of lower achievers onto it to see if it floated. Then, to cover their tracks, they shifted the national conversation from “What do our kids know?” to “How do they feel?”
They prioritized soft skills over hard knowledge. Participation trophies replaced performance incentives and inflated grades substituted for real learning. Kids left high school more emotionally confused than intellectually prepared. They even coined a new term, “adulting,” because mature behavior became such a foreign concept. The schools have been producing eternal children for too long.
They’re also teaching kids to outsource thinking. (Just Google it.) Artificial intelligence and calculators might help with homework, but they also train in dependency. Students memorize less, understand less and rely more.
The question becomes whether America can afford to outsource our intellect.
The U.S. once led the world in innovation, from the cotton gin to the traffic light. Now most of our students are meandering toward complacency and mediocrity. Our unlimited imaginations were fueled by reading, not by consuming the visual pablum of our streaming services.
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This isn’t a partisan jab. NAEP scores were falling before COVID, before any woke curriculum debates, before anyone warned about “too much technology.” They’ve been falling since we started the Department of Education and since schooling began.
Pandemic interruptions worsened things, but the rot was already there. If we don’t reverse course, we’re writing an obituary for American exceptionalism. We may be eclipsed by a world that takes competition seriously.
There are simple steps to regain that entrepreneurial spirit that provided the engine for nearly the greatest triumph in human history. Instead of sending our healthy children into institutions that essentially mimic prisons, revert back to trusting children’s intuitive and curious character – their natural drive to learn.
Parents’ voices must matter more in our schools. Parental involvement is the number one predictor of academic achievement. They must be included in any dialogue about children’s learning.
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We must teach phonics instead of the failed “whole word reading method” that is pushed in our schools.
Standards should be clearly defined: if you can’t read above eighth-grade level, you don’t graduate.
No more participation awards for mediocrity. Show kids that effort matters, not just feelings.
Money should flow to classrooms: textbooks, tutors, coaches – not more diversity officers. Streamline school budgets and cut costs to superfluous administrator overhead.
Invest in logic, rhetoric and debate. Teaching kids how to argue and dissect arguments will train them to think deeply, which beats shallow scrolling every time.
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Make books sexy again. Family reading nights. Library trips. Book “flirtation,” not forced indoctrination.
We’ve effectively taught kids to edit their selfies, but not their sentences. We aren’t doomed – but we’re dangerously adrift. The war on reading – the war on thinking – is real, but the front line is in living rooms and school board meetings. America’s destiny isn’t lost. It lies in the courage to demand more – for our children, and our country.
America’s future shouldn’t be scripted by bureaucracy – but by bright, curious, literate kids. Let’s fight back.