The Missing Dimension in Education

America’s educational system is in freefall. Compared to a decade ago, math scores fell in 70 percent of school districts, while reading scores fell in 83 percent of school districts. Overall, the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project estimates that math scores have dropped about 0.4 grade levels, while reading scores have dropped by roughly 0.6 grade levels. This precipitous decline has affected rich and poor, city and country, black and white.

What is happening in America?

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is concerned. Speaking on cnbc, he pointed to New York City’s school system as a case study. “They spend $44,000 per student,” he said. “That’s 30 percent more per student than other big cities like Chicago, L.A. and Boston, and it’s three times more than Miami and Houston.”

Then came the kicker! “If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive, we’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee, and then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.” He went on to lambast bureaucratic inefficiency.

Think about that for a second. We are sending our children into these schools for six, seven, eight hours a day. But what are they getting in return? America’s educational system is failing the next generation!

Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse shares Bezos’s concerns. In remarks accepting the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Award on May 6, he noted that the United States spends nearly $1 trillion per year on public K–12 education. That’s more than 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, roughly $20,000 per student. Yet 70 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in reading, and more than 70 percent of eighth graders cannot do basic math. Sasse’s conclusion: “Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults.”

It is a disaster on every level. There is no other way to describe it. A century ago, America was producing students proficient in arithmetic, civics, geography, history, literature, penmanship and spelling in one-room schoolhouses with practically no budget. Though many of America’s teachers certainly could stand to be better paid, the root cause of the education crisis certainly isn’t a lack of monetary funding.

A shocking report from the New York Post details a practice that has become common: Parents will spend $10,000 on neuropsychological assessments to get their children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd), not because their child is genuinely struggling but because the diagnosis buys extra time on college entrance exams. Nearly 7 percent of students across multiple types of exams now receive additional time or special accommodations, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, the parents are cheating. The children are cheating. And the schools do not complain, because the more students are diagnosed with special needs, the more government funding flows in.

What has happened to us? All the money, all the gadgets, all the reasoning and all the accommodating have failed to produce students who can think, work or lead as well as their parents’ generation.

Men like Bezos and Sasse are shocked, yet the late Herbert W. Armstrong saw this coming decades ago. He described our civilization with a phrase that has never been more accurate: “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” This phrase is taken from 2 Timothy 3, a chapter that describes the “last days.” It highlights how humanity is surrounded by oceans of information yet cannot solve its problems because we have rejected the missing dimension in education.

“We make decisions; dogs and cattle and elephants and horses do not,” Mr. Armstrong explained in a 1955 sermon. “They have brains. They have a certain intelligence, some of them. You can teach them many tricks, but it’s merely a repetition. And they have a brain that can absorb a certain thing: If they’re taught to do it, they will do it as a matter of habit. But to reason out rationally, and to think logically, and to put a lot of things together and come to a conclusion, to indulge in creative thought, to plan and devise something and to make something, and decide how to put things together to make a newer thing and a new idea, and then to have the ability to execute it and do it—no dumb animal has that power. That is the power of God! And God has given us a little bit of that power, and what have we done with it? We’ve chosen evil, and we have chosen so much evil, and we have rejected God and the way of God that He has set before us.”

This is the real reason America’s educational standards are plummeting. Humanity’s collective store of knowledge has never been greater, but we are not teaching our children the character required to labor, to listen, to study and to think critically about what they hear and see. According to some studies, even students’ IQ is declining as they offload memorization and thinking ability to computers.

As a nation, we have rejected humanity’s God-like power to choose to believe and obey God; as a consequence, our children are losing even their ability to reason, to think and to draw conclusions. The Apostle Peter explained this process in detail when he wrote that those who “walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness” become as “natural brute beasts” (2 Peter 2:10-12). The Greek word for brute is alogos, which means absurd, irrational, unreasonable or against the Logos.

In other words, since the Logos is the Being through whom God imparted rationality to the physical creation (John 1:1-3), rebelling against God and His Word can cause a person to lose the ability to think rationally, giving him or her the limited reasoning skills of a “natural brute beast.” We see this happening all over America today as people stop caring about logic, facts, evidence or truth.

This tragic state of affairs is why God established His one true Church as a type of teachers’ college in preparation for teaching all mankind in the coming Kingdom of God!

“The Church may be called God’s teachers’ college to prepare rulers and teachers for the Kingdom of God when God does offer redemption and eternal life to the world as a whole,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in Chapter 6 of Mystery of the Ages. “The Church was planned to be God’s instrumentality for calling predestinated human beings out of this world to be trained for positions of leadership in the World Tomorrow, when they shall teach and train others. That is why in the New Testament, the Church is called the firstfruits of God’s salvation. All this necessitated certain vital steps—one at a time—in the procedure of God’s supreme master plan!”

Look at the condition of America’s schools and you see the need for God’s teachers’ college more than ever. We are looking at the fulfillment of Isaiah 3. Where are the leaders? God truly has taken away the “mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator” (verses 2-3).

Where are the teachers who will step forward and fight for the children? Men like Jeff Bezos and Ben Sasse realize there is a problem, but they don’t have the solution. This is because the real solution is about a lot more than funding, truthful diagnoses or even better curricula and better teachers. The real solution starts with obedience: obedience to God and His law. As the Apostle Peter taught us, those who “walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government” will inevitably become like presumptuous, self-willed beasts, afflicted by absurd, irrational reasoning.

To learn more, read Education With Vision.