The Hidden Crisis in Our Classrooms: Why Education Without Character Is Failing America

Fei Tian College Northern students and friends enjoying fall on campus in Middletown, N.Y. Courtesy of Fei Tian College Northern

Commentary

Is there a problem with higher education in the United States? 

College enrollment more than doubled between 1970 and 2010, but dropped by 15 percent between 2010 and 2021. What does this mean for the high school student who is unsure about college?

Imagine that 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 that higher education presents.

You find the school you want, and apply. Good news: You’re accepted! On 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 previous generation in history. Yet, as study after study has revealed, 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 1024 in 2024, indicating a consistent decline over several years. Mental health crises plague our campuses. Graduates enter a workforce in which only 31 percent of people in the United States report being engaged at work, while 52 percent are not engaged and 17 percent 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 the United States. 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 the focus of education from character formation to utilitarian aims. While some aspects of Dewey’s approach—such as experiential learning and critical thinking—retain value, his broader impact contributed to our culture’s tendency to treat 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 by endowment size and graduate salaries, but equally important is the question “What kind of people are our graduates becoming?”

When education and material pursuit become 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. Traditionally, 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 enlightening students to discover transcendent ideals that could guide a meaningful life.

Consider the disconnect students feel today. When they ask “When will I ever use this?” they are tacitly expressing 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 of 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 more than 2,000 years ago: “If a person can recite 300 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, or doing whatever one wants, whenever one wants, with as little restraint as possible. But true freedom is autonomy (from the Greek word “auto-nomos,” meaning “self-law”): the capacity to develop personal goals and standards that exceed those expected by society, possessing an inner law of the heart connected to self-control and mindful decision-making.

Education must again be based on the recognition that human beings possess a spiritual nature. Authentic education must engage the soul, not just the intellect. Although others see education primarily as a means to acquire power, status, or material success, we see it as a path to self-transcendence, a way to move beyond ego-driven desires toward a higher purpose.

This isn’t anti-materialist romanticism. We think that 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 not only succeed professionally, but also 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, a generation ready to not just navigate the world as it is, but to shape the world as it should be.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.