Why Education Without Character Is Failing America
Is there a problem with higher education in the United States?
College enrollment more than doubled between 1970 and 2010, but dropped 15 percent between 2010 and 2021. What does this mean for the high school student who is unsure about college?
Imagine you are a high school senior in the United States. It is a big year filled with big decisions: what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Your parents, teachers, and friends are all talking about college and the opportunities higher education presents.
You find the school you want and apply. Good news: you’re accepted! The first day of class, you walk onto your college campus and witness a peculiar contradiction. Your classmates carry the latest technology, attend an institution with an abundance of resources, and have access to more information than any generation in history. Yet study after study reveals the same troubling reality: they’re more anxious, more depressed, and more disconnected from meaningful purpose than ever before.
The symptoms are everywhere. Average SAT scores dropped from 1060 in 2021 to just 1024 in 2024, a consistent decline spanning years. Mental health crises plague our campuses. Graduates enter a workforce where only 31% in the U.S. report being engaged at work, while 52% are not engaged and 17% are actively disengaged. Despite unprecedented access to formal schooling (a privilege unimaginable to most humans throughout history), we’re producing a generation that finds learning “boring” and work meaningless.
Something fundamental seems to have gone wrong with education in America. And it feels like the stakes are civilizational. This challenge isn’t only about budgets or technology, but about restoring the foundation of education: character, morality, and meaning. Perhaps the real question is not whether we can afford to pursue this vision, but whether we can afford not to.
Modern educational institutions have become remarkably efficient at producing graduates who can navigate spreadsheets, write reports, and follow instructions. What they’ve largely abandoned is the cultivation of character: the development of human beings who are both upright and capable, possessing virtue alongside ability.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. Much of it can be traced to the influence of educational theorist John Dewey, whose philosophy shifted education from character formation toward utilitarian aims. While some aspects of Dewey’s approach (experiential learning, critical thinking) retain value, his broader impact contributed to treating values as “socially constructed and relative” rather than objectively discernible truths worth pursuing.
On many college campuses throughout the United States, students are increasingly referred to as “customers” and “clients” rather than as “students” mentored by professors. Success is often measured through endowment size and graduate salaries, when equally important is the question: what kind of people are our graduates becoming?
When education and material pursuit becomes detached from character formation, the consequences ripple through society: declining trust, ethical failures in leadership, and a generation that, while professionally competent, often lacks the moral compass needed to navigate complex challenges or contribute meaningfully to the common good.
The ancients understood something we’ve forgotten. In traditional times, academia was designed to help human beings comprehend what is true, good, and beautiful. Schooling nurtured the only tool we truly possess: our thinking minds. The goal was never job preparation—it was enlightenment to transcendent ideals that could guide a meaningful life.
Consider the disconnect students feel today. What’s tacitly expressed in their statements like “When will I ever use this?” is actually the hope for a profound rationale for learning. Students desire a transcendent reason for study but lack the words to articulate it, so they call it “boring.”
There is a higher reason for school: to become a human being enlightened to intellectual wisdom and rationality, whose mind is unstoppable before any problem. It’s to become an intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting person whose success nurtures a sense of completion in the heart.
Confucius noted over two thousand years ago: “If a person can recite three hundred poems but is incapable of performing an entrusted official duty and exercising one’s initiative when sent abroad, what good are the many poems to that person?” True education must balance following orders with exercising initiative, self-restraint with creative decision-making.
As Socrates taught, there are two kinds of freedom. There’s the freedom of license—doing whatever one wants whenever one wants with as little restraint as possible. But true freedom is autonomy (auto-nomos, meaning “self-law”): the capacity to develop personal goals and standards higher than those expected by society, possessing an inner law of the heart connected to self-control and mindful decision-making.
Education must regain the recognition that human beings possess a spiritual nature, and authentic education must engage the soul, not just the intellect. Where others see education primarily as a means to acquire power, status, or material success, we see it as a path to self-transcendence: movement beyond ego-driven desires toward higher purpose.
This isn’t anti-materialist romanticism. We think all graduates should succeed professionally and contribute meaningfully to economic life.But we should also aim for them to do so from a foundation of moral clarity and transcendent purpose that provides resilience, direction, and the capacity to uplift those around them—which we consider the true measure of educational success.
The goal is what Plato described in the Republic: the liberal arts serve as “handmaidens and helpers” that “lift the eye of the soul upward” toward divinity. Through literature, history, philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, science, and art, students come to perceive the divine illumination that exists in all things.
When education cultivates both virtue and ability, when it develops character alongside capability, it produces leaders who don’t just succeed professionally but who uplift those around them. It creates citizens capable of self-governance, innovators driven by more than profit, and human beings who find meaning beyond material accumulation.
We extend an invitation to families seeking more than job preparation for their children, to educators hoping to recover their profession’s noble purpose, and to anyone who senses that the stakes are too high for an incomplete education. Together, we can cultivate a generation that possesses both virtue and ability—ready not just to navigate the world as it is, but to shape the world as it should be.
