In our local newspaper there has been extensive coverage of this year’s schoolboard elections and the numerous newcomers running on a platform of “reform.” What used to be a mundane aspect of local civic life has been charged with national political rhetoric and talking points, and schoolboards have become battlegrounds across the country. While it is good that interest and concern regarding education is increasing, calls for reform and policy change are unlikely to improve the status quo very much until the foundational assumptions built into the system are rooted out. The rot is deep. This isn’t the age of schoolhouse rocks, but schoolhouse rots.
For thirteen years I taught history and coached sports in the public school system. I was a department chair and on numerous committees. The educational problems becoming more evident today go much deeper—down to foundational assumptions about humanity and reality itself that have been woven into the warp and woof of the educational system. What many people are waking up to is rotten fruit from the withering vine of progressive education. For more than a century, it has grown in the unfertile and contaminated soil of faulty ideas about the nature of the human person and of truth and the nature of God and of the universe. And when the fruit is rotten and the tree is decayed, it’s time to find another tree—and better soil.