America’s Real Problem Isn’t Failure. It’s No Consequences

I was listening to a talk by Thomas Sowell yesterday. He noted that when businesses make poor quality or useless products that no one wants, they lose money and either learn something or go out of business. But when a government program fails, no lessons get learned. It isn't their money, it's the taxpayers. Instead, they ask for more money and do more of the same. 

One of the saddest failures today is our American education system. For years we've seen articles about the decline of education, including not only outcomes but expectations and standards as well.  

Here's just one example of how far we've fallen, a 2024 article in The Atlantic titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," by Rose Horowitch. The subtitle sinks home her message: "To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school."

Horowitch examines how many students at elite colleges (e.g., Columbia, UVA) arrive unprepared to read full books—often due to high school practices favoring short excerpts, standardized testing, smartphones, and shorter attention spans. Professors note students struggling with long-form reading, getting overwhelmed by novels or multiple books per semester, and sometimes shutting down when facing unfamiliar or challenging ideas.

This feels shocking to me. I remember reading Dickens freshman year (A Tale of Two Cities) and having an "Aha!" moment my sophomore year while reading Cyrano de Bergerac. I have a hard time imagining an education without reading being a fundmental practice. 

Over the past decade, according to Idress Kahloon, staff writer for The Atlantic, American students’ academic skills have sharply declined, regressing to levels not seen in 25 years. Test scores have fallen to record lows, while the percentage of students reading at a “below basic” level has reached record highs. As staff writer Rose Horowitch has reported, a shocking number of American college students say they didn’t read an entire book in middle or high school. What exactly went wrong?

Some believe Covid is partly to blame, along with smartphones. But Kahloon believes there is aother factor a play: low expectations.“Schools have demanded less and less from students,” he writes, “who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less.”

When I read this I wondered if this is one of a primary issue is our country today: low expectations. When people fail to find a job, or simply make poor decisions, we

When I read this I wondered if this is one of the primary issues in our country today: low expectations. When people fail to find a job, or simply make poor decisions, we look for someone or something else to blame. The system. The economy. The curriculum.  

But rarely do we ask: What was expected? And was it enough?

Expectations shape behavior. When standards are high, people stretch. When standards fall, people settle. That’s not cruelty—it’s human nature. 

In my case it was expected that I would get good grades and I got them. My parents also expected me to go to college. In short, they set me on a trajectory. (There was also an incentive when I was in grade school. I'd get a dime for every A and yes, incentives matter.

Somewhere along the way, society began confusing compassion with the removal of standards. We didn’t want students to feel discouraged, so we made the work easier. We didn’t want failure to sting, so we softened the consequences. We didn’t want anyone left behind, so we lowered the bar.

But lowering the bar doesn’t lift people up. It simply changes what “success” means.

And over time, that redefinition spreads. If a student can graduate without reading a book, what else can be bypassed? If effort is optional, what happens to discipline? If discomfort is avoided, what happens to growth? Failure is painful, but it's also a prod that goads us to figure out the why. 

I once knew a publisher who had previously been a high school football coach in Texas. If you know Texas, football was a big deal for small towns there. He was recruited to coach a team in another town that had never won a game in several years, and frequently they were spanked quite badly. When he arrived, he quickly saw the problem. There were kids with talent, and heart, who loved playing foorball. But they were in the wrong division. It would be like college kids playing the Seattle Seahawks. By spearheading the division change, his team was suddenly competitive.  

The point here: failure is an opportunity to learn. And sometimes the solution involves thinking outside the box.

This is not just an education problem. It’s a cultural one. Thomas Sowell’s point lingers here. In the private sector, failure teaches. In public systems, failure can be absorbed, explained away, or funded again. The feedback loop breaks. And when that happens, decline can continue for a long time before anyone is forced to reckon with it.

The irony is that most people—especially young people—are capable of far more than we ask of them. The question is whether we still believe that. Because if we don’t expect much, we shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t get much.

Values Formation and Black Urban Culture

How much of who we are is influenced by our fathers and how much do we choose?

I woke this morning thinking about some of the ways our fathers influence us. Education was important to my dad, and it pleased him when we got good grades. I don't know exactly how long it lasted but a dime for each A on my report card led to more diligent efforts in elementary school. My second grade report card had quite a few A's and a series of D's for handwriting. I don't recall ever being rebuked for those D's, with the subsequent result that my penmanship has never been a thing of beauty. And I always expected that I would one day go to college, as sure as it felt inevitable that I would one day grow up and marry.

What's interesting is how our tastes can also be shaped by our dads. My appreciation for classical music goes to those early years as well. Dad frequently read the Sunday paper while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak or Beethoven. He liked baseball and I wanted to be a baseball star. He listened to pop music on the radio as we drove in the car, and he watched the television shows which were popular in their day, such as Bonanza, Perry Mason, and Saturday Night at the Movies.

My dad's days were quite proscribed by the rituals of rising each morning, putting on the radio at 7:00 a.m., making breakfast and driving off to work, returning at 5:30 every evening. After supper, he would sit in his chair reading his books with the TV on. Having grown up poor, Dad valued frugality, saving and responsibility.

I even noticed that some of my tastes with regard to humor were related to the way Dad responded to various comedians. The Marx Brothers were funny, Jerry Lewis was not. He never told me I couldn't laugh at Jerry Lewis, but one could sense his scorn and it shaded the way I responded at the time.

In short, the dye runs deep into the fabric of our developing souls, and it can be challenging to identify where our own personal values get chosen and where they get imprinted.

What about people who grow up without fathers? Who shapes their values? In particular, I'm thinking here of the up and coming generation of inner city black youth with absentee fathers and fractured families. Or rather, I was reflecting on Orlando Patterson's New York Times editorial, "A Poverty of the Mind."

Patterson, a Harvard professor of sociology, opens the discussion with this. "SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it."

After pointing out examples where the problems of black youth are systemic, he notes, "What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power."

Patterson's editorial gives me the impression that the problems of race in America are going to be with us for a long time. The freedoms won by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including the elimination of Jim Crow laws, are external in nature. Whether red or yellow, black or white, there are deeper internal victories that each individual must achieve in the arena of their own souls.

We all tend to oversimplify problems, in part because we'd also like an easy fix. Lenin, in the Russian Revolution, put forth education and electrification as the twin objectives that would make for the brightest tomorrow. We hear it here all the time. If only the schools were better.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple according to Patterson.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

What we're seeing is a bi-product of our racist past. Fortunately, a majority of blacks, according to Patterson, have escaped these social patterns. This does not mean we can close our eyes to the serious cultural issues in our inner cities.

The article, whixch is worth reading, challenged a few of my cherished notions which may need to be discarded or re-examined.