A backward US education system is undermining our foreign policy

“There are a lot of killers,” President Donald Trump said in 2017, defending Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You think our country’s so innocent?”

Policymakers used to joke in the 1990s that the U.S. can’t do foreign policy because Republicans think America is too good for the world and Democrats think the world is too good for America. In the 2020s, however, neither Democrats nor Republicans think the U.S. and its allies make good role models.

Sadly, we can blame American educators for making it so.

At the Dec. 5 congressional hearings on antisemitism, which embarrassed the leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, Americans saw how the Democratic Party’s vanguard institutions, elite universities, view Western democracies such as Israel and Western values such as free speech, on which Harvard happens to rank dead last in the country.

President Biden, a politician of the 1980s and in his 80s, will be the last Democratic president more supportive of democratic Israel than its authoritarian enemies. Leftist professors and reporters paint “indigenous” Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and Israelis, who have deep historical roots in the region, as “settler colonialists.”

Woke influencers are a bit embarrassed that Israelis can criticize their government and elect their leaders, whereas Gazans could be killed if they even try. One cannot say anything so politically incorrect on PBS or at Harvard, but free speech and free elections are inventions of Western civilization.

Lacking Western freedoms, Gazans (like Russians) can never hold their leaders accountable for starting quixotic wars and then refusing to negotiate terms of surrender, even as their people suffer the consequences.

On foreign policy, Republicans used to be the grownups. But as Nikki Haley’s campaign craters, it seems likely that George W. Bush will be the last Republican president committed to the NATO alliance containing Russia. Trump ponders leaving NATO. Trump-backer and gonzo journalist Tucker Carlson praises Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. The Republican-led U.S. House seems unable to pass an aid package to help Ukrainians defend their own country, in spite of a signed U.S. commitment to help them do just that.

So how did Americans, ranging ideologically from MAGA Republicans to woke Harvard students, achieve such global ignorance that the U.S. can no longer conduct foreign policy?

Our national devolution took a century. The culprit is K-12 education.

The beginning of the end for U.S. global leadership came in 1918, when the National Education Association issued its highly influential “Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education.” As Jonathan Wai and I detail in “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done About It,” this was when education professors and administrators disparaged as impractical and inequitable the teaching of topics that cannot be applied directly to a job. After all, not everyone learns at such high levels.

In recent decades, the progressive approaches of the Cardinal Principles have become even more dominant. I often see this in fieldwork, as when an award-winning high school principal boasted that the most exciting thing about their school was not learning math, science, great literature or the U.S. Constitution, but rather students “developing their own brand on social media.”

The prioritization of branding over knowledge prepares students to emulate Trump, or 1619 creator Nikole Hannah-Jones — hardly our best national role models.

The marginalization of academic content explains why so few social studies teachers know how Vladimir Putin’s time in the KGB has shaped his worldview. And state “standards” only reinforce educator ignorance. My coauthor, Martha Bradley-Dorsey, and I found that of the 51 social studies and civics frameworks in the states and the District of Columbia, 39 fail to mention NATO. Only New York’s explicitly covers the Soviet mass murder of millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor. While 11 states cover American McCarthyism, not one mentions Putin’s KGB or Stalin’s purges and show trials.

Those vast chasms in historical knowledge have left teachers and their students unable to understand why democracies are better than dictatorships, why NATO matters and why Ukrainians are bothering to fight for their country.

Hostility toward teaching western concepts such as democracy and the nation-state also reflects the victimization lenses of leading education researchers. Compare how two scholarly organizations, the left-leaning American Political Science Association (APSA) and the far more radical American Educational Research Association (AERA), reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. APSA clearly condemned “the unprovoked and unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In contrast, AERA treated the Russian invasion as if it were a case of domestic abuse, emphasizing personal trauma and the right to “violence-free environments, which are essential for effective scholarship and learning.” War, AERA lamented, “will harm survivors for years and decades to come.” 

APSA would send the Ukrainian government the guns it needs. AERA would send grief counselors, as if that could deter Putin.

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it is impossible to remain both ignorant and free for long. That means that, in order to fix democracy and foreign policy, we must first fix our schools.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and a former school board member.