Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
How did American voters get so dumb? Thank a public school.
It’s a modern fetish that we’re brilliant but our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn’t have iPhones, internets, or Kim Kardashian.
This is also academic consensus, for what it’s worth. It’s called the Flynn Effect—the idea is people do better on puzzles, so we must be smarter. Of course, one wonders if puzzles translate into, say, understanding monetary policy or how welfare destroys families.
Thankfully, we have a real-world test: actual political campaigns. Back when I was a professor, I ran every inaugural address through a Flesch-Kincaid text analysis to measure the grade level. The logic being top speechwriters know how to talk at voters’ level.
Doing that, it turns out we are getting dumb breathtakingly fast. In 1900, inaugurals were written at between 13th and 14th grade—modern college level. Today, they’re eighth grade for Barack Obama, ninth grade for Donald Trump, and … seventh grade for Joe Biden.
It gets worse the further back we go: Andrew Jackson’s 1828 inaugural was written at 22nd grade—meaning, strictly speaking, two Ph.D.s was the median voter in 1828.
Keep in mind Jackson was a populist man-of-the-people.
George Washington’s inaugural was closer to 26th grade.
Also keep in mind almost nobody in 1828—or 1789—had a formal education.
Jackson kicks off with, “Undertaking the arduous duties that I have been appointed.” Washington starts with, “Among the vicissitudes incident to life.” For Biden it’s, “This is America’s day.”
So how did we get so dumb?
Easy: public schools.
The modern government school came from 1800s Prussia, which had enough of worker riots and peasant revolts and resolved to indoctrinate kids into pro-regime obedience. It worked like a charm, turning the once unruly Germans into a government-directed army that went on to do terrible things.
Left-wing American intellectuals were fascinated by Prussia’s indoctrination and imported it to the U.S. They were motivated not by peasant revolts but by the frustratingly small-government ethos of Catholics. Progressives figured they couldn’t frog-march American Catholics into government utopia, but they have the children.
These activists spread government schools to every state and got a major boost postwar, when competence tests for employment were declared discriminatory, forcing companies to instead rely on formal education to discover talent. This launched the university from a fringe toy for the 1% into a $300,000 tax on anybody hoping for a white-collar job.
Meanwhile, like all government programs, opportunists—teachers unions—took over, spending $878 billion per year dutifully peddling politics but neglecting the actual purpose of education, leaving American kids illiterate and innumerate. In a video last year, I mentioned how fully 23 Baltimore schools had precisely zero students proficient in math, and in Detroit, 96% of students lacked proficiency in math, and 95% can’t even read. But by gum, they know their demi-genders.
Take people who can’t name a state or don’t know what the Supreme Court is, wash them with decades of left-wing propaganda, stick them in a voter booth, and here we are.
So, what’s next?
If we’re to save our democracy, we have to save our voters—by replacing government schools with schools that actually teach instead of indoctrinate. That could mean school choice, it could mean vouchers, it could mean home schooling co-ops. But until we fix it, things will keep getting worse.
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