The Three Doomsday Horsemen of Public Education

Before this article begins, it must be remembered that American public education has allowed many children to receive great educations. Teachers who deeply care about their students are able to open their eyes to the vast expanse of the world and the knowledge in it, along with empowering them to live more successful lives as citizens and workers. While the school system has done so much good, it has suffered plenty of criticism over the decades, and particularly in the last 10 years. While some criticism is gratuitous, public education overwhelmingly teaches three fundamental lies that are harming the societal, economic, and spiritual well-being of Americans. A fundamental fact of the 21st century American school system is the primacy of individualism, which does little but separate people from fulfilling opportunities and relationships. Additionally, the inherently materialistic lens through which the world is viewed makes it impossible for students to understand the unpredictability and mystery of the world, leading them to vote for increasingly authoritarian policies. Finally, the idea of the steady march of world improvement as a certainty has harmed appreciation for the current state of prosperity and dullened people’s minds to the effort and intentionality that has brought about the state of the world today.

Only you can define your own happiness. This sentiment was spoken in thousands of ways in thousands of different classrooms across the country today. The rejection of any outside standard of morality has rung in the tyranny of the individual. The school system has overwhelmingly adopted this tactic of taking a “non-stance” to morality in the pursuit of serving students from different religious backgrounds, which is a worthy goal. However, rather than a lack of specificity, this stance has created an extremely specific individualistic viewpoint that equally offends all the religions the school system seeks to defend. To say anything other than that everyone’s subjective desires are right is considered extremely offensive. Of course, not every individual can have their way, which makes this sort of logic extremely untenable. Certain wants must give way to others, and a confusion and particularization of individual morality has allowed government power to fill the void. Where families and communities used to stand up together to forms of government oppression, now a sea of disconnected individuals must fight with confusion to establish their own identities before they can even think of reining in government in mutually beneficial ways.…