What Happened to Education

Full text

Edited transcript

This transcript was supplied by Homeschool Now and cleaned for readability. Spoken phrasing and the episode’s qualifications have been preserved.

There was a time when a fairly ordinary definition of education sounded something like, develop the abilities of the person by giving him knowledge. Language, history, literature, scientific reasoning, rhetoric, the kinds of subjects through which the mind grows and learns to think. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt opens the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America with a 1927 dictionary definition built around this exact idea. Education meant drawing out a person’s abilities through knowledge. Now, jump forward almost 100 years. In 2026, the United States Department of Education announced a new $44 million program designed to help states connect grades K–12 students with career pathways and workforce readiness programs. The department says one purpose is to expose children to what it calls, “real-life workforce realities”. Think about those two descriptions for a moment. One emphasizes the development of the mind through knowledge.

The other emphasizes preparing students for realities in the workforce. Both are being called education. But are they describing the same thing? And that is where our investigation begins. This is the Homeschool Now Show. Christ is Lord, children are entrusted to families. And education is never just about producing a score, a credential, or a worker. On this show, we’re going to investigate what American education has become by following its history, its policies, its research, and the testimony of people who actually work inside it. One of our guides will be Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. You may have heard of her before. She has an enormous paper trail that she assembled in the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

But Iserbyt is not our final authority. We’re going to be checking these documents. We’re going to separate what they prove from what they may suggest. And when the evidence takes us somewhere uncomfortable—politically convenient or politically inconvenient—I do not care about the politics. We are going to follow it anyway. We don’t begin with who said it. We actually begin with whether or not it’s true. So follow the paper trail. Before we talk about Skinner, before we talk about John Dewey, before we talk about the Rockefeller money, before testing competencies, data systems, graduate profiles, or school-to-work programs, we need to answer a simpler question.

Let’s get this simple question out of the way. What is education for? Because if you change the answer to that question, almost everything downstream can change with it, like what you teach, how you teach, what you test, what you reward, what you call success, and eventually what kind of person the system is trying to produce. Iserbyt believed that this was exactly what actually happened. Her book presents American education as moving through three broad periods. First, what the introduction of her book calls academic education, from roughly 1880 to 1960. She calls it academic education. Keep that in mind, because the next phase, you might say, is values education. In her view, that period ran from 1960 to 1980. And then there was the workforce training education from about 1980 through the end of the century.

Now, that’s Iserbyt’s map. It is not something I’m asking you to accept simply because she wrote it. It is simply what she wrote. And we’re gleaning a lot from her book. So I want to be open to her ideas as I’m studying these and applying these to our contemporary educational circumstances. In her preface, she says that she was reluctant to assign malicious intent to every individual educational development she encountered. She wanted to see whether separate events could actually be connected across time before drawing any larger conclusion. And that’s a good rule for us as well. One similarity proves very little. Obviously, a slogan doesn’t prove much. One strange program, again, not very much to prove there.

But when similar structures keep appearing right across decades, institutions, states, and political administrations, now they deserve our investigation. And so that’s what we’re going to do because we’re seeing a pattern here. Let’s go back to that older definition. I’m not necessarily claiming that every American school in 1927 was excellent. Far be it for me to say something like that. I’m not claiming that every teacher taught well. I’m not claiming every child received a classical education. And I’m certainly not claiming that there was some educational golden age where, everything at some point was perfect. Not necessarily.

The question that I’m posing is actually quite narrower. How was education being described? Iserbyt cites a dictionary called the New Century Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in 1927. Its definition centers education on drawing out a person’s abilities by imparting knowledge in things like language, scientific reasoning, history, literature, and rhetoric. But notice the center of gravity there. The child develops by encountering knowledge. The teacher teaches something. The student comes to know something. The mind is strengthened through the substance being learned. That’s a recognizable idea of education. Everyone can reckon with that, can recognize that as being the way education is meant to be. A child studies history because history is worth knowing, He studies literature because great writing enlarges his understanding. She learns mathematics because mathematical truth trains the mind to reason.

Knowledge is not or should not merely be a tool for producing some later behavior. Knowledge by itself matters. Now, compare that with another passage Iserbyt places immediately beside it. She quotes a 1934 educational psychology text by Rudolph Pintner and several co-authors. The vocabulary chart changes sharply. Learning at that point is described in terms of the nervous system, such as connections, situations, responses, readiness sequence, and what the authors call satisfying consequences. Now, we’re going to spend several episodes unpacking where this language came from. So stay with me. I am not saying that because someone used the word “response,” education therefore became behaviorism. That would be sloppy and probably unsubstantiated. For now, just hear the difference in how the subject is being discussed. One description asks what knowledge will develop the person.

The other describes how learning happens through connections between situations and responses. So basically, put simply, a person faces a situation, for instance, he responds, some responses become stronger than others. That’s a very different way of talking about learning. And that’s the point I’m making here. Today we are not mainly asking how the new educational methods worked. We are asking something that should precede that. What were they ultimately trying to accomplish? So we’re going to leave in 1934 for a moment and come back to the present, okay?

Today, schools obviously still teach academic subjects. Children still study reading, mathematics, science, history, literature. Those things did not simply disappear. That point matters so much that I want to say it twice. Academic education did not disappear, okay? What changed is that schools are increasingly being asked to accomplish much more than academic learning. And I want to repeat that twice. Schools are increasingly being asked to accomplish much more than simply academic learning. So look at the federal government’s own current language. The Department of Education says a career pathways system coordinates K–12 and postsecondary education and helps students acquire academic employability and technical skills that employers demand. The same federal page says these systems should use labor market information and active employer involvement so education and training meet employer skill and competency needs.

That’s not somebody’s interpretation of federal policy. That’s the federal government’s description of their own system. And again, career preparation is not automatically bad. I obviously believe in, prepping for your career, and we’ll come back to that. But notice how the educational purpose has widened. At one time it was academic knowledge, and now it’s employability. The school is not necessarily being asked merely, does a child understand mathematics? Can the child read? Does the child know history? It’s also being asked, is the student employable? Is the student career-ready? Does the student possess the competencies employers need? Does the student fit a pathway into work.

And this is not confined to one political party. As you know, I am indifferent when it comes to political parties. That is not the point of this investigation. However, in 2026, under the Trump administration, the Departments of Education and Labor described a federal partnership intended to integrate programs promoting career pathways, workforce readiness, and teacher preparation with programs already administered by the Department of Labor. I hope you recognizing what’s happening here. So it’s not about any administration. It goes beyond that. We want to follow the architecture, not the politics. Guys, so we’re going to take a look at New York.

Let’s go over to New York mentally. In 2025, the New York State Board of Regents adopted a statewide “Portrait of a Graduate”. The state says the portrait describes the essential skills and dispositions. Dispositions, meaning like attitudes and certain, worldviews and perspectives a student should develop for success in college careers and civic life. The official framework includes academic preparation. Good, right. But it also includes things like communication, innovation, global citizenship, reflection, social awareness, responsible decision making, and other qualities the state wants graduates to demonstrate. Again, don’t hear me saying that those qualities are necessarily bad, because some are indeed plainly good.

The question is actually more basic. What now belongs inside the definition of an educated student? Because the answer from 1927, as we just looked at, has actually quite expanded, and we’re here to investigate that. Now let’s turn to Oklahoma. In 2026, Graduation requirements still contain familiar academic subjects like, English, math, laboratory science, history, fine arts, so on and so forth. But the official graduation document says students may satisfy the state’s 23 requirements through units or sets of competencies. That doesn’t mean Oklahoma abolished academic knowledge, because it didn’t. What it means is that educational success can increasingly be expressed in the language of demonstrated competencies rather than only time spent studying a course. We’ll deal with that distinction really carefully in episode two.

But for now, just notice the vocabulary. Check out this list. Skills, competencies. Career readiness, Employability. Graduate outcomes and dispositions. The old subjects are obviously still in the building, but they are now surrounded by a much larger set of goals. And that’s what we’re really investigating. And that’s what Iserbyt was looking into. And the title of her book derives from the conclusion that she reaches, which we’ll talk about very soon in either this episode or in a later episode. The evidence does not support necessarily saying schools stop teaching academics and replace them nationwide with job training. Not yet. That’s way too broad. What the evidence strongly supports is this. Schools still teach academics, but they are now being asked to produce much more than academic knowledge.

So the academic mission remains. It’s just around it, Additional purposes have grown up around it. Social purposes. What does that have to do with academics? Behavioral purposes? How is that the school or the institution or the systems concerned? Career purposes? Perhaps. But is that academics, or is it trying to put a child on a predetermined path toward a career outcome the child may or may not even want? Perhaps the child wants to be an entrepreneur. Maybe the child wants to be a banker. Maybe the child wants to own the bank. Maybe the child wants to be a business owner in some field or in some domain that perhaps has nothing to do with what they’re learning, in school.

So competencies and all these broadened categories such as skills and competencies and career readiness and employability. Is that really what they’re going to school for? Just think about it. Is that why you’re sending your child to school? And for a lot of people, we have become so molded to believe that is the purpose of school. So if that is what you want, then so be it. But oftentimes, teaching your child or having your child, become more socially aware or having your child’s behavior and attitudes sculpted in a classroom, is that really what education is actually about? And Iserbyt says no. Iserbyt says no.

So if we ask whether Iserbyt’s exact three-stage timeline has been completely proven by what we’ve looked at so far, the answer is also no. We are at the beginning. But if we ask whether the stated purpose of modern schooling has expanded far beyond traditional academic subject matter, the answer is clearly yes. And that is enough to keep following the trail. Guys, so listen to their own words. Iserbyt’s introduction describes the movement this way. She says it goes from academic education. We talked about that. To values education, and later to workforce training education. That was the 1980 to the end of the century, 2000, and of course, she has since passed away.

But we’re even Forward looking from 2000 to 2026. That’s 26 years beyond the writing of this book. So with that being said, let’s jump to the United States Department of Education in 2026. Its Career Pathways exploration program is designed to expose K–12 students, to “real-life workforce realities”. Those two documents do not necessarily prove every link in Iserbyt’s argument, but they do. And also, they don’t prove that everybody involved shares one motive. To just put your child, in someone’s factory or in someone’s, sweat house to work a job nine-to-five for the rest of their lives. It may not necessarily even prove that every career program is descended from something that Iserbyt documented decades ago.

But they do establish something worth investigating. The language of education now openly includes workforce preparation and not as an accidental side effect. It’s actually as policy documents tell us what systems say they want, teachers can sometimes show us what those priorities do in a classroom. So I’m going to talk to you really briefly about a teacher’s testimony. A teacher named Victor Malo-Juvera wrote about his first year teaching in Florida. He worked in an overcrowded school. He didn’t even have classroom of his own. He moved between, other teachers rooms while they were on planning periods. After one class in his department head’s room, she asked him a simple question: “Why are you teaching grammar?” Grammar was not even on the state exam. The test was the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. It was also called the FCAT, and the school’s letter grade depended on that test.

So the grades carried rewards and punishments for teachers and administrators. So think about how ordinary that exchange sounds. He was teaching grammar. His supervisor asked him why. Because grammar wasn’t on the test. No law had to say necessarily, grammar is forbidden. No administrator had to walk into the room and rip the grammar book out of his hand. The accountability structure already sent the message: what gets measured is what matters; what gets measured gets the time. What does not count toward the measured result has to fight to survive in the classroom.

So that’s one reason the old saying is so persistent. What gets tested gets taught. And here’s another way to put it. You don’t always have to prohibit something to remove it. You can simply stop rewarding it. So you don’t have to say, thou shalt not teach grammar. You just say, well, if you teach grammar, that’s fine, but if you spend more time on these subject matters or these competencies or these skills, then you’ll be rewarded with abcd. Now this is one teacher’s story doesn’t prove what happened in every American school.

So it shouldn’t carry that weight. But it gives us a clear picture of the mechanism: the system defines a result. The result gets measured. The measurement carries real-life consequences, and those consequences begin shaping what happens between a teacher and a child. We’ll return to that later in the series, but for now, just keep that story in your pocket. Grammar wasn’t banned, it just wasn’t on the test. So what actually changed? Let’s collect what we have so far. The older definition Iserbyt cites centers education on the development of human abilities through knowledge. Then educational psychology increasingly developed another language for learning situations, responses, connections, consequences. And today, official education policy openly includes academic knowledge alongside competencies, dispositions, career readiness, technological skills, employability, and workforce alignment.

So what actually happened? The strongest simple sentence the evidence has earned so far is that the mission just got much bigger, That is not automatically the same thing as saying the mission got worse or, it’s degraded in some regard, although many of us would think so. But some additions may be useful, some may be necessary, some may become dangerous. We need to investigate each one and we intend to do just that. Once the mission expands, the authority of the educational institution can expand with it. And that can become a problem. If the school is responsible for reading and mathematics, it needs authority to teach and evaluate reading and mathematics. If the school is also responsible for career readiness, it now needs ways to define and evaluate career readiness. If it’s responsible for dispositions, it needs some idea of which dispositions are desirable.

If it is responsible for social and emotional development, again, how is this the school’s concern? How is your child’s social and emotional development the concern of anyone except the parents? Think deeply about that. Once a system takes responsibility for an outcome, it must define, cultivate, and often measure that outcome. That can mean influencing how a child is taught to feel or think about certain things. And you’re like, well, this is meant to get back to math, English, science and arithmetic. We can simplify it even further.

Consider the traditional “three R’s”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But no, they want to develop your child’s social and emotional well being and their development. Can you see the issue? Every new educational outcome brings another question. So who defines success? Suppose we agree that schools should develop children socially. By what standard? And who defines that standard? And who measures whether or not that standard has been achieved? Let’s give the strongest argument on the other side. Let’s just be nice and play the devil’s advocate for a minute. Young people need to work. Work is good. Learning a trade is good. Apprenticeship can be excellent. Technical education can be excellent. A student may discover a vocation through a career program that he would never have discovered sitting behind a desk. An educational program that helps a young woman become, let’s say, an electrician or a machinist or, a nurse or a programmer, some sort of skilled carpenter or whatever, has not harmed her merely because education led toward employment.

And for many families, the assumption that every 17 year old or something must immediately enter four-year college has created problems of its own. And that is a serious truth. So this show is not going to treat the words career or workforce as dirty words, because they’re not. Most people have to go out and get a job, and have to follow a certain career, a career pathway. And the Bible is not hostile to work. Work existed before the Fall. Human beings were created to exercise stewardship and fruitful labor. The problem comes when we reverse the order. Work belongs inside human purpose. Human purpose does not fit inside workforce development. It is similar to Jesus’ statement that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The order matters. The Sabbath was made for man; man was not created for the Sabbath.

In the same way human beings were created to exercise stewardship and fruitful labor. They’re designed to do these things. Not necessarily designed from birth to get on a career path. Like there’s some sort of, some sort of robot or something. That should not be the intent and that should not be the end goal. A child is more than a job. He’s more than his performance. And education must be large enough to recognize that Genesis begins with something more basic than just employability. God created man in his own image. That’s where Christian education begins. Not with what does the economy need? No, not with competencies. What competencies does the employer need? Not even with what score does the state need or what career will this child have? Those questions have a place, but they are downstream.

First, the question is, who is this child? This child is a person made in the image and likeness of God. He’s a moral being. He’s an image bearer. He’s a reasoning person, a creature capable of worship, of love, judgment, obedience and disobedience, making choices that are life-shaping, eternal, and temporal. A person who will someday stand before God. That child may become a plumber, a physician, a mother, a soldier, a business owner, a teacher—perhaps several of those things in one lifetime. But before the child becomes a worker, the child is first a person. That distinction has to remain clear. The person should be recognized for his abilities, personhood, and value as an individual long before we try to put him on a track toward some career pathway.

And this is where homeschoolers, especially should pay attention. It would be very easy to spend 20 minutes examining public education and simply conclude, “That’s why we homeschool.” But moving education into the house does not automatically answer the question. We can reproduce the same assumptions at the kitchen table, can’t we? Finish the lesson, pass the test, check the box, earn the credit, complete the software, build the transcript, get the credential. Go to college, get the job. And again, those things are not necessarily wrong. I’m not here to condemn those because I do a lot of it myself.

But if those things become the definition of education, we may have accidentally changed the location without changing the purpose. A homeschool can become just as obsessed with completion as an institution. A child could finish every page and understand very little. A student can earn excellent scores while caring very little about truth. It can become, “Well, I finished my workbook.” But what about truth? What about love? What about purity? What about your personness, your personhood? But I finished my math test. Great, and that’s awesome, and I’m very proud of you.

But what about the person? A teenager can assemble a beautiful transcript while never learning how to judge an argument, how to recognize errors when he hears them or read a difficult book or, explain why something is worth believing or not worth believing. So the question is not simply, where does my child go to school? That’s a good start. But the deeper question is, what do I believe education is actually for? Have we changed the location of our children’s schooling or have we reconsidered the purpose? We started with two descriptions. An older definition centered on developing the person through knowledge. That was the older 1927 definition Iserbyt quoted. Then there is the modern federal program centered partly on preparing children in grades K–12 for workforce realities. Those are two very different definitions.

I should not say they are entirely different. One is simply more expansive: one includes preparing you for the workforce; the older definition emphasizes developing the person through knowledge. We looked at Iserbyt’s claim that American education moved from academic education through values education and toward workforce training. We found that her entire historical thesis is not going to be proven in just this one episode. It can’t be. I don’t have time to go into the whole thing in one episode. But we have found that the modern expansion of education’s stated purpose is a real thing. Academics remain, but around them we now find competencies, graduate outcomes, career readiness, employability, dispositions, technical skills, and workforce alignment. We’re seeing these things as a broader and I should say, an expanded version of what education is.

We also reviewed the teacher testimony. We learned from a teacher who learned a very simple lesson about institutional priorities. Grammar wasn’t forbidden. It simply wasn’t on the test. So here’s a question I want to leave you with. When we say a child is educated, what exactly do we mean? Does he know things, understand things, reason, judge, recognize truth? Can he or she perform a required competency, fit a workforce need, demonstrate a desired disposition? Because before we can understand what happened to education, we have to know what education actually is. I could do multiple series under this umbrella topic—education and how it has drifted from its original stated purpose—and still miss many of you. I’ll miss many of you because you would never have understood what education was meant to be for.

In our conditioned minds, we may simply assume that social development is obviously part of education because children need to learn how to get along with other children at school. Yes, but are they merely learning to get along with other children? Or are they learning to adopt other children’s belief systems, to groupthink, to converge in beliefs, values, and principles, and to be “hammered in” like a nail that stands out whenever they say something that upsets the room? What exactly are they learning? And if education and training are not exactly the same thing, then we have another question waiting for us, don’t we?

So next episode we’re going to talk about education or training. We’ll look at what happens when schools decide the results they want first and then teach toward that result. And we’re going to measure whether they got, what it is that they wanted because training can be useful sometimes. It’s exactly what we need. The Bible itself talks about training. But can a person be highly trained and still not be well educated? That’s where we’re going next. Until then, follow the paper trail. This has been Juanita with the Homeschool Now Show. Thank you so much for tuning in. God bless you. See you next time.