The Blind Leading the Dumb—and the Hateful America’s schools are collapsing not from lack of funding but from a teacher pipeline that churns out ideology instead of knowledge—leaving students functionally illiterate. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/27/the-blind-leading-the-dumb-and-the-hateful/
About three decades ago, when I was part of the Washington research team of a now-defunct brokerage house, I worked (with my then-boss) on a report about the state of the American education system. The results—unsurprisingly—were not good. The system was in disarray, with towns, cities, and even the federal government spending more and more tax dollars on education every year and getting worse and worse results. The educational and political establishments had convinced the American people that the problem with education was that they simply weren’t spending enough money on it and that, if they did, the people who broke the system in the first place could fix it and, by extension, could fix the country as well. Unfortunately, the data showed definitively that this was untrue.
Based on our research, we concluded that something more obvious—and more uncomfortable—than funding was the real root of the problem with American education. It was obvious because… well… it just was. It made perfect sense. It was uncomfortable because it hit close to home. We knew that what we had learned would likely be taken as insulting or, at the very least, overly provocative by a number of our clients and other readers, including friends and even family. My mom was a teacher. We both had friends who were teachers or whose spouses and/or kids were teachers. Like almost everyone, we had fond memories of that one (or more) special teacher who, when we were kids, helped us in some unique way or influenced us profoundly. Teachers are, for good reason, heroic figures in much of American history. And yet, everything we read and heard and studied indicated that teachers were an enormous part of the problem with American education.
To be clear, the main culprits in our story were teachers’ colleges, not individual teachers. Still, the colleges were a problem because they were churning out inferior products, which, of course, meant that many of the teachers in the American education system were not up to the job—the absolutely imperative job of preparing the next generations of Americans for intellectual and professional life.
In our report, titled “The Dumb Leading the Blind,” we noted the difficult truth that the nation’s education schools had largely become a dumping ground for college students who couldn’t hack it in any other degree program. That wasn’t—and isn’t—to say that all students who wanted to be teachers were dumb. Far from it. Most were smart and earnest and dedicated and resembled the heroic teachers of American lore. At the same time, however, what they were being taught was mostly nonsense: bland, simplistic, often trite twaddle that was disguised and legitimized as “educational theory.” Ed. School curricula were so preposterous and so lacking in academic rigor that almost anyone could—and did—pass without much effort. A multi-decades-long effort by educational “reformers” to shift the focus of teacher instruction away from subject matter and to cognitive theory and epistemology had meaningfully dumbed down the curricula. In turn, students who failed out of other colleges ended up earning degrees in ed. schools because it was shockingly easy to do so. Meanwhile, smart and earnest students were denied a proper education by their instructors, who taught down to the lowest common denominator.
All of this, we argued, suggested that American K-12 education would, in the long run, grow even worse, even more expensive, and even more controversial. And that could only bode ill for the nation as a whole.
Fast-forward 30 years… and… well…
In an essay published last spring, a tenured philosophy professor who writes under the pseudonym Hilarius Bookbinder (a pen name previously used by Soren Kierkegaard) noted the following:
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate,” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time, they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Bookbinder goes on to explain students’ deficiencies in writing and arithmetic as well, which are equally horrific. He concludes by blaming society and absolving teachers for this mess, but, naturally, I think he’s wrong. Yes, society shoulders some of the blame here, but that’s only part of the much bigger story. In the years since we first wrote about the problems with teacher training, the problem has grown infinitely worse. Today, in addition to being the dumping grounds for poor students and laboratories for naïve educational theories, Ed. Schools are hubs of ideological indoctrination.
Recently, Daniel Buck—a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network, and a former teacher and school administrator—noted that “the most-assigned books and essays for prospective teachers are a heady mixture of race essentialism, gender theory, and outright Marxist cookery” and that “education schools are indeed, as a former Harvard president once called them, a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” Similarly, Joel Kotkin—the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas—pointed out that “Today teachers, whose training now focuses far more on radical themes, tilt towards the Left, more so even than Hollywood actors. And once they have graduated, more of these teachers embrace an agit-prop orientation.” The long-term implications of all of this, Kotkin continues, “are hard to contradict.” In short, “A recent federal survey suggests that 28 percent of Americans now occupy the lowest level of literacy, up from 19 percent in 2017. We may now also be seeing the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years.”
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, dozens, if not hundreds, of teachers around the country have been suspended or fired for celebrating his heinous act of ideological violence. And while I generally object to “cancel culture,” whether it comes from the Left or the Right, it’s clear that people who would celebrate politically motivated murder have no business being around kids, much less being paid with tax dollars to indoctrinate them.
The bad news is that the teachers dumb enough to get caught spreading ideological hate are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A much larger percentage of teachers see it as their duty to propagandize kids rather than teach them anything even remotely related to “the three Rs.”
The good news, if there is any, is that they’re probably not any better at teaching political hate than they are at teaching anything else.
The worst news is that this lack of ability is, in itself, a major problem—and has been for a long time. My apologies if that’s uncomfortable to hear.
Comments are closed.
