On this episode of Feudal Future, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky engage with Stephannie Saroki de Garcia, Soledad Usura, and Tony Lemus, dissecting the profound effects of Catholic school environments on underserved communities in California.
On this episode of Feudal Future, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky discuss reforms to higher education that could better equip students for a fluid job market and reinvigorate dynamic campus culture.
For generations, education has been a primary means to make countries like Canada and the United States stronger, more productive, and self-confident. Now the education system is not only failing to perform its primary mission for young people, but increasingly works to undermine and divide nations.
On this episode of Feudal Future, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky discuss the top key issues that society faces as we enter 2024.
On this episode of Feudal Future, former California State Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero and retired superintendent Mike Christensen join hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky, to dissect the intricate web of challenges for California’s education system. We also discuss the transformative power of diverse educational strategies and their potential to enrich the learning journey for every student.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky talk with Walter Russell Mead, foreign affairs expert, about the underlying issues of conflict in the Middle East. We also unveil American energy independence’s under-appreciated significance and how it shapes the region’s geopolitics.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky discuss academic freedom and cancel culture on American campuses with guests Sam Abrams and Danielle Struppa.
If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.
~Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire
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History has moved to the front line of social conflict, but rarely has it been so poorly understood and sketchily taught. After decades of declining interest, only 13 percent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject today. The New York Times reports that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” This phenomenon can be seen across the West. The study of and interest in the past, noted the Economist in 2019, has largely disappeared in the UK. Study of the 19th century, meanwhile, seems to be vanishing from European classrooms. “We are in danger of mass amnesia, being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history,” noted the late Jane Jacobs in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead. When I show my students a picture of Lenin, barely one-in-ten of them recognize it.
Universities should be beacons of dispassionate learning, so it is particularly unfortunate that they have also been increasingly complicit in obliterating much that is valuable to historical instruction and understanding. In a 2013 article for the Guardian, Ashley Thorne lamented that university curricula were largely ignoring the literary classics. At many US colleges, Thorne noted, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students. This breaks a vital link with the past that allows students to identify with their ancestors as part of an ongoing human story, rather than simply dismissing their thoughts and actions as alien, unintelligible, or even intrinsically evil.
The problem is further exacerbated by the much-discussed decline in academic viewpoint diversity, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. The history profession was once famously disputatious, but over the last generation or so, a diminishing number of conservative or even centrist historians has produced monocultural groupthink. A national survey of faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, conducted in 2005, found that liberals were already seven times more numerous across history departments than conservatives. Without the cut-and-thrust of lively historical debate, history risks becoming an ideological discipline, as was the case in the Soviet Union or China today, taught by rote and incapable of generating excitement and interest.
The consequent decline in historical understanding suggests that generations of students will leave higher education ill-prepared to engage or even bother with the past. The 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment found that 86 percent of 15-year-olds are unable to tell the difference between opinion and fact. This lack of preparation empowers propagandists, who often know little about history to start with, to twist the past to suit their own ideological purposes for an equally ignorant audience.
Less remarked upon is the impact that this ignorance can have on how we understand our present and future. An understanding of the past that dwells exclusively on our crimes, mistakes, and failures at the expense of our achievements produces a distorted picture of human potential and an unwarranted sense of despair. This is particularly evident in the pessimism with which younger generations approach issues like race relations, climate change, and the continuing viability of liberal democracy. For if there is no hope to be found in the past, what possible hope can there be for the future?
Critics of traditional history instruction on matters related to race do sometimes raise valid points. Past school curricula distorted history in its own ways, particularly by ignoring the contributions of Asians and Hispanics as well as indigenous groups like Native Americans and Africans. A controversial claim made by one historian in the Washington Post (specifically, that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill opposed Nazism for its commitment to racial supremacy) may have provoked outrage from right-wing pundits, but the point was not entirely misplaced.
Ignorance and the willful politicization of historical debate, however, have also led to some outright fabulism. Vice President Kamala Harris inflamed the dispute over Florida’s history guidelines by falsely alleging that they mandate an outrageously revisionist account of American slavery. The Telegraph recently reported that, at Cambridge, students are being taught that “Anglo Saxons aren’t real” due to the term’s allegedly problematic ethnic connotations. Indigenous leaders in the Commonwealth have recently demanded that King Charles apologize for crimes committed long before he was born. And of course, there are ongoing efforts to redefine July 4th as a moment for national shame and atonement rather than celebration.
Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo credit: African American children learning about Thanksgiving, with model log cabin on table, Whittier Primary School, Hampton, Virginia. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, [1899 or 1900]. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
The suicide of former Toronto school principle Richard Bilkszto, 60, was one that many of his associates believe was prompted, at least in part, by vicious attacks from an “anti-racism” instructor. After he differed on her assessment of pervasive structural racism, she held up his comments as an example of “white supremacy.” In the progressive-dominated education bureaucracy, this stands as among the worst of sins.
America is suffering from a worker shortage, but a more persistent and perhaps even urgent problem is the profound lack of skills among younger Americans. American elite universities may still be still regarded as the world’s best, but for most young people, the educational system—from grade school to graduate school—is something of a failure, a critical engine of persistent inequality and diminished competition on the international stage.
This crisis in competence predates the pandemic. So does the very related labor shortage. The percentage of firms reporting shortages of labor more than doubled between 2015 and 2020, to 70 percent. Low birthrates among millennials has created what the forecasting firm EMSI describes as a “demographic drought,” as U.S. population growth between 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the eighties to less than 5 percent last decade. By 2028, Korn Ferry projects there will be a deficit of at least six million workers.
But the bigger problem is not just numbers; consider that our competitors, notably China, face even more challenging demographics. The big issue is the lack of skills throughout the workforce. From grade to graduate schools, our education is deteriorating.
Our education system, with its hyper-focus on four-year colleges, has failed its students. This about one staggering statistic: Over the past 20 years, we have created twice as many bachelor’s degrees as jobs to employ those who have earned them. Over 40 percent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree. Many graduate programs produce fancy degrees that never return the investment for an estimated 40 percent of master’s students, particularly those earning degrees outside the sciences, business, medicine and education
Students are getting the message: A survey taken in 2020 found that only a third of undergraduates see their educations as advancing their career goals, and barely one in five think the BA is worth the cost. The basic reality is this: The upfront investment is high (tuition fees for four-year public colleges have increased by an average of 213 percent in real terms between 1988 and 2017) but the return on investment seems to be failing.
It is likely universities may have reached their apogee and are trending down from their high point. A survey from in 2020 found that only a third of undergraduates saw their education as advancing their career goals, and barely one in five think that a bachelor’s degree is worth the cost. The vast majority of young people prioritize such things as finding a good paying job over the social uplift and hefty tuitions associated with four-year colleges. Not surprisingly, overall college enrollment is not simply dropping; it’s fallen a full 11 percent in the past decade.
Increasingly employers recognize the education industry’s failures. Companies like Google and Apple no longer require a college degree and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk treat universities with a skepticism that borders on disdain, calling it “not for learning” and favoring dropouts who “did something.”
Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Washington State DoT via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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