The West’s Only Real Crisis is a Knowledge Crisis
The Enemy Within – Part 1: The Decline of Our Education System
Foreword
When we talk about the state of education, we often focus on the ‘woke culture’ that now dominates Western universities. But what we often overlook is that ‘woke’ isn’t the cause of today’s cultural and economic crises—it’s a symptom. It reflects over thirty years of educational decline, during which independent thinking and personal responsibility were sidelined in favor of shallow ideas about equality and identity-focused agendas. Instead of encouraging students to think for themselves and pursue their own paths, we’ve fallen into a culture of mindless entertainment and comfort, where dissenting ideas are discouraged rather than valued. This downward spiral has created a society that clings to easy answers, where comfort comes first, and where personal accountability and growth are no longer central values.
In my book Coddled Children, I explore what happens when the drive for equality overrides everything else, leaving no room for self-development or autonomy. When life is reduced to standardized, “safe” paths, we lose both individual freedom and our capacity to innovate and move forward. It’s time to ask ourselves: how much longer can we maintain a system that’s weakened the very foundations of knowledge, creativity, and freedom? And what, if anything, can we still do to turn things around?
This article is the first in a three-part series examining the state of education. The first part traces thirty years of educational decline and its causes; the second lays out its consequences, and the third discusses whether—and how—we might still save Western society.
Introduction
The Western world is caught in a troubling downward spiral. After decades of technological, scientific, and economic progress, it’s becoming clear that this growth has stalled. A large part of this stagnation can be attributed to thirty years of educational decline and a growing disinterest in intellectual development. Where each generation once seemed to build on the knowledge and skills of the last, today we’re seeing the reverse. Worse yet, we’ve reached a point where the current generation appears ill-equipped to handle the complex responsibilities our society demands, resulting in multiple crises, relentless inflation and an erosion of our prosperity and standards.
Ours is now a society where knowledge, skills, and critical thinking no longer meet the standard. People are brought up in a culture of complacency, where shallow opinions and prepackaged answers carry more weight than independent thinking and problem-solving. Our debates and decisions have grown increasingly one-sided, lacking the depth needed to tackle complex challenges.
This trend is evident across nearly every sector: in education, the workforce, and especially in political decision-making. We’ve become a society that shies away from critical self-reflection, turning instead to outside solutions and oversimplified explanations. This mindset leaves us vulnerable, fueling a culture where we’re quicker to blame external forces than to tackle our own shortcomings. If the West doesn’t reverse this downward spiral and make a genuine commitment to restoring knowledge and critical thinking, even military dominance won’t save us.
And yet, we hear remarkably little about any of this. Instead, we’re bombarded with alarming stories about foreign interference, angry dictators looking to build autocratic empires, and populist leaders supposedly threatening ‘our democracy.’ But history shows us that stirring up fears about external threats and authoritarian leaders often just serves to distract from stagnation at home. It may draw attention away from underlying weaknesses, but it never resolves them. On the contrary, fear and scapegoating have never reversed economic decline or intellectual erosion. They merely shift the focus from what really needs doing—investing in knowledge and competence—and allow internal problems to fester.
It’s time to stop pretending that the West’s biggest threat comes from outside forces seeking to overthrow ‘our democracy.’ The real threat lies within: our own incompetence and complacency have flung the doors wide open to our undoing.
Looking Back on 30 Years of Educational Decline
Ironically enough, the decline of education in the West, began almost simultaneously across all the western countries in the 1990s. Back then, the goal seemed clear and justifiable: raise the overall level of knowledge to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly changing economy. With globalization and automation wiping out low-skilled jobs, Western leaders saw education as the cornerstone for building a knowledge economy that would guard against new waves of unemployment. Yet they also wanted to close socio-economic gaps by lowering dropout rates and addressing educational inequalities for immigrants and disadvantaged groups.
But here, a fundamental conflict emerged: achieving high educational standards requires freedom, individual responsibility, and the chance to reach one’s full potential. Yet striving for equality in outcomes often results in mediocrity. What began as a push for equal opportunity quickly morphed into a drive for equal results. The focus shifted from the substance of knowledge to measuring outcomes, with the aim of getting as many disadvantaged students as possible into higher education, regardless of ability, interest, or motivation. Rather than challenging students to grow, the system became bogged down in standardization, bureaucracy, and an unhealthy fixation on test scores. What was intended as progress turned out, in practice, the start of a downward spiral.
This shift has undermined education in four major ways:
1. From Equal Opportunity to Equal Outcomes
Before the reforms, Western education already provided equal access to knowledge and resources. Equal opportunity essentially meant that every child, regardless of background, had access to education and the chance to succeed. But in the 1990s, reforms redefined equality. A fair start was no longer enough; the new goal became “equal outcomes” for all students. In reality, this meant lowering standards for everyone.
After all, in order to make results equal, educational targets had to be set to the abilities of the lowest-performing students. When the aim is for everyone to pass—no matter their talent or motivation—minimum standards must be adjusted so that no one falls behind. Like a chain being only as strong as its weakest link, the overall level of education became defined by those who struggled the most. Achieving equal results left only one real option: lower the bar, sacrificing depth and challenge.
This was evident in the Netherlands with the introduction of a broad, shallow curriculum in 1992. Students who could easily meet these basic requirements lost motivation because the curriculum was no longer tailored to their potential. Meanwhile, those who needed extra support struggled to meet even these lowered expectations. The result was an educational system where strong students were left unchallenged, and weaker students were simply pushed through the system.
In the United States, Educational programs like ‘No Child Left Behind’ created a similar leveling down through standardized learning targets. The UK, Sweden, Canada, and Australia all followed suit, creating programs that ultimately didn’t raise standards but lowered them, leading to an overall decline in educational quality.
Education once aimed to help students reach their full potential; now, in the pursuit of equal outcomes, it’s become a system where everyone must be able to keep up—even at the expense of genuine learning and personal growth. Education has become a safety net where a student’s effort barely matters. After thirty years we now have a generation unaccustomed to thinking for themselves but well-accustomed to having everything handed to them on a silver platter. Sounds familiar?
2. The Erosion of Teaching as a Craft
These reforms also degraded the profession of teaching. Policymakers introduced standardized curricula and testing methods to make results “measurable.” But this left teachers with less freedom to tailor lessons to their students’ needs. Rather than inspiring minds, teachers were reduced to following pre-set curricula, with little room to bring their expertise into the classroom.
Frustrated, many teachers left the field, replaced by a new generation trained within this weakened system. The result? A vicious cycle, with each new generation of teachers less skilled and less able to foster critical and analytical thinking.
3. Testing Over Knowledge
Across most Western countries, testing has become the dominant way to assess educational performance. Political agendas and performance targets now largely dictate what students learn. Schools are rated based on how many students meet specific standards, not on the knowledge they impart. Since schools are judged according to socio-economic indicators, the focus has shifted from real learning to hitting political benchmarks.
This focus on test scores says little about actual learning and even less about students’ intellectual development. In fact, it has drastically devalued diplomas and educational performance is now a poor measure of real knowledge or ability. As a result, the West is overflowing with so-called “highly educated” people, but only a few of them can truly grasp the complexities of today’s world or contribute to innovation. Meanwhile, fields like healthcare, engineering and IT face acute shortages of skilled workers.
4. Civic and Ideological Agendas Over Basic Skills
In recent decades, the focus in education has shifted from essential skills like reading, writing, and math to civic and ideological topics. Rather than preparing students for a world with diverse perspectives, they’re given a curriculum centered on themes like sustainability and social justice, often presented so one-sidedly that it discourages critical thinking or the exploration of other viewpoints.
This approach turns students into passive consumers of opinions rather than critical, independent thinkers. The result? A generation that, after years of schooling, lacks basic skills and has been taught mainly to think what others want them to think. Education, once a place for intellectual and personal growth, has become a tool for social programming, producing adults unaccustomed to taking responsibility or thinking beyond the obvious—leaving our society and economy stagnant.
Conclusion
In this first article, I’ve shared some background on the decline of our education system and its impact on our youth, stripping away critical thinking, personal responsibility, and the drive for excellence. There is of course much more to explore on this topic and I’m only an observant writer, not a specialist. Yet the effect of education on a society’s performance is undeniable. In the next part of this series, I’ll delve into the ripple effects of this decline, asking what happens when a society raised on lowered standards and spoon-fed beliefs encounters real-world challenges. How does a generation fare when it lacks the tools to innovate, question, or even grasp the complexities of its own world? The consequences, I believe, may be more urgent—and more unsettling—than we’re ready to face.
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