The evidence pointing to systemic failure in the U.S.’s education system is overwhelming — and I’m not just talking about the massive number of students who sit in U.S. classrooms year-after-year without learning to read or do math.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, our so-called Nation’s Report Card, found that nearly half (45%) of all 12th graders couldn’t do basic math and a third (32%) hadn’t mastered basic reading. We’re talking about the basic “knowledge and skills that are fundamental” to competency in a subject.
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Remember, these were high school seniors who were supposedly just months away from being college and workplace ready.
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But the education system is failing us in another important way as well, despite the spending each year of massive amounts of money — an estimated $878 billion in fiscal 2025 alone — to educate our children.
That other important purpose has little to do with helping students get into college, ease them into high-paying jobs, or prepare them for social media careers as “influencers” or podcasters.
That purpose is to prepare young people for productive lives as citizens in a free society.
This is the primary reason many of America’s founders supported public schools, even before many of them supported American independence. The U.S.’s first public school — Boston Latin School — was established in 1635, just 15 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Boston Latin alumni include five signers of the Declaration of Independence: Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, William Hooper, and Robert Treat Paine.
Though from extraordinarily different backgrounds, both Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, and a slave owner in his time, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the 20th century civil rights icon, saw the role of schooling substantially through the same double lens: to help students succeed in life and to make them better citizens.
As Jefferson put it in an 1818 report for the University of Virginia, education’s purpose is “To give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing.” But also, Jefferson wrote, “To know his rights,” and “To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either.”
As an undergraduate at Morehouse College in 1947, King offered similar views: “It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture.”
King continued: “Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.”
But to focus solely on utility isn’t enough, he argued, because “education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
We must remember, he said, that “intelligence alone is not enough. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”
Today, many children aren’t learning either: the skills they need to succeed as productive individuals or the lessons they need to understand their rights and duties as members of a free society.
Consider a subject dear to me: economics.
Just 22 states currently require students to successfully complete a course in economics to graduate high school, four fewer than in 2024.
Many of these courses, however, primarily emphasize what King referred to as “utility” skills — opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, balancing a checkbook, calculating how much a loan might cost.
Unfortunately, most courses don’t dive deeply (if at all) into actual economics questions, such as “how to weigh the costs of a proposal against its possible benefits,” “who will be helped by a certain policy and who might be hurt,” or at a more basic level, “This is a great idea, but at what cost?”
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It is this kind of thinking that, later in life, will help the graduate to both identify some “worthy objectives upon which to concentrate” and “discharge with competence” his or her responsibilities as a member of society.
Among its other failures, our education system tragically isn’t teaching America’s students the kind of disciplined economic and civic thinking our country urgently needs for the next 250 years.
Richard N. Lorenc, former executive vice president of the Foundation for Economic Education, is president and CEO of Lexandria, an education nonprofit that seeks to reignite the American spirit through innovative classroom content and tools.
