In his keynote address at the National Symposium for Classical Education in February, Daniel Scoggin, co-founder of the classical charter school network Great Hearts Academies, traced the decline of classical education in America back to liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, ideas that, in his telling, unleashed an individualism, industrialism, and relativism antithetical to any education oriented to truth, beauty, and goodness.
In October 2022, the U.S. Department of Education released data from the Nation’s Report Card, a nationally representative assessment of student achievement at various age levels. The latest results the first since 2019 demonstrate serious and widespread learning losses since before the pandemic.