Our society is failing its most important task: fostering human flourishing. And schools aren’t helping. Far too many students graduate unprepared to think critically, navigate community, or develop the resilience needed to face life’s challenges. To be clear, many of these capacities aren’t fully captured by grades or tests, and efforts to broaden how we think about success are often well intentioned. The problem is that in expanding the definition, we’ve too often let go of the core.
Making matters worse, the metrics we do rely on to assess education quality—grades, graduation rates, and state assessments—paint a misleadingly rosy picture. A growing number of states have quietly tinkered with cut scores to create the illusion of proficiency. Meanwhile, official statements from state education agencies resemble the “this is fine” meme, sunny proclamations in the middle of a five-alarm fire.
Many observers warn that these shortcomings will only become more consequential as AI and automation take on a growing share of human labor. In a future where traditional work may become less central, human flourishing will depend even more on our ability to create meaning, sustain social bonds, and govern ourselves well. Schools play a critical role here: Strong foundations in academics and character equip students to think clearly, communicate effectively, and manage complex social and civic situations. Academic decline is therefore both a consequence and a cause of societal fragility—a vicious circle we risk amplifying unless schools prepare students to flourish now and in the decades ahead.
That dynamic is no longer theoretical. This disconnect between reported success and actual preparedness burst into public view with last month’s University of California San Diego report showing that hundreds of incoming freshmen—many of them straight-A high schoolers who took trigonometry and even calculus—need remedial support in math skills that are typically taught in elementary and middle school. The findings broke out of the ed policy bubble and into the mainstream, drawing coverage and commentary from, among others, Kelsey Piper, Rose Horowitch, and Megan McArdle, whose Washington Post column put it bluntly: The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore.
McArdle’s assessment captured the crux of the matter:
Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see—or rectify—pandemic-era learning loss.
On his Plain English podcast, Derek Thompson describes this moment not as a series of isolated incidents or mere academic decline but as a structural unraveling. Widespread weakness in math, logic, and basic skills does more than shrink individual prospects. It undermines human flourishing itself. A society less able to reason, deliberate, and solve problems together is more vulnerable to polarization, mistrust, and civic breakdown.
This matters for schools because human flourishing is not just about what skills students will need, but what kind of people and institutions they will depend on. And right now, we’re not doing well on either front. If, in the AI age, traditional employment is no longer the default, the need for civic strength—shared norms, personal responsibility, functioning schools, and a foundation of common decency—will only intensify. Put simply, a society already rattled by institutional decay may not handle the stresses of technological and social change well.
How, then, should schools navigate these crosscurrents? A few practical implications follow:
1. Elementary schools should rethink the use of screens and focus unapologetically on the basics.
Literacy and numeracy remain the foundation of everything that follows. In a moment when screens increasingly crowd out sustained attention, these core skills matter more, not less. The battle for successful students is largely won or lost in the early years, and no amount of technology can compensate for shaky fundamentals. If AI is going to do more of the cognitive heavy lifting later in life, students will still need a strong baseline of reading, writing, and mathematical reasoning to avoid becoming passive consumers of machine-generated answers.
2. High schools need major reform.
We talk about “K–12” as if it were a single system, but grades 9–12 operate under different pressures, incentives, and cultural expectations than elementary and middle schools. They are credentialing factories, social sorting mechanisms, and increasingly performance venues for AI-assisted content. High schools are long overdue for a redesign that emphasizes real mastery over performative achievement and pushes students toward genuine readiness for life after high school, whether that means work, vocational training, or higher education. A good place to start would be a zero-based budgeting approach for high school course requirements, as proposed by my colleague Mike Petrilli.
3. The link between high school and higher ed is ripe for retooling.
Selective college admissions is now an arms race in which students use AI to polish their application essays while colleges use AI to screen them. At some point, one must ask: What are we doing? The entire high-school-to-college pipeline is predicated on assumptions about work and prosperity that may not hold. If college becomes less relevant—or at least less economically determinative—high schools will need to rethink their purpose, and colleges will need to reconsider how they evaluate applicants in a world where higher education is just one of several options.
4. Civic formation will matter more in a post-work world.
If fewer people work in the traditional sense, schools will inevitably bear some responsibility for shaping citizens capable of navigating a world with more free time, more technological mediation, and greater uncertainty. This doesn’t mean schools should try to shoulder every formative task—that would let families, communities, and civic institutions off the hook—but they do have a distinctive role in teaching habits of thought, resilience, and responsible decision-making that are hard to cultivate elsewhere.
The best approach is to focus on what schools are uniquely equipped to do: help students cultivate gratitude for the contributions of others, foster optimism without naivete, and encourage resilience in the face of real challenges. It means teaching them to engage thoughtfully with community and country, without indoctrination, and equipping them to navigate a culture that often emphasizes doom and gloom in ways that actively undermine their chances to flourish.
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Even if AI and robotics displace more of our everyday lives, the need for human networks and connections only grows. Elon Musk, in a recent interview, remarked that students could still go to college, but “for social reasons.” It sounds flippant, but the subtext is important: Relationships, community, and social capital will matter more in a world where traditional work is no longer inevitable. The real test for schools is whether they will produce young people who feel capable, connected, and ready to participate or whether they deepen the despair already sapping the country’s confidence.
