How Classical Education Is the Path Forward

Something has gone wrong with American education. Not at the margins — at the core.

In 2024, 45% of American 12th graders scored below Basic in math on the Nation's Report Card — the highest percentage ever recorded. Reading scores for 13-year-olds have fallen back to 1971 levels. On the 2022 PISA international assessment, American students ranked 26th in math out of 81 countries — 110 points behind Singapore.

These are not pandemic blips. The decline started long before 2020. And the causes run deeper than remote learning or screen time, though both play a role.

The question is: how did we get here? And more importantly, what actually works?

The Freirian Turn

Much of modern American education theory traces back to one book: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English in 1970. It is the third most-cited text in the social sciences (Google Scholar, 2016) and has sold nearly one million copies. A 2003 study by David Steiner and Susan Rozen found it was one of the most frequently assigned texts across 16 elite schools of education. Sol Stern, writing in City Journal, described its status as “near-iconic in America's teacher-training programs.”

Freire's central argument is that all education is political, and that teachers have “a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that proclaims its own political character.” His framework applies a Marxist lens of oppressors and oppressed to the classroom. His footnotes cite Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

What his book does not contain is any discussion of curriculum, testing, or age-appropriate learning — the things that actually help a teacher teach.

This matters because Freire's ideas reshaped what American teachers are trained to prioritize. The shift moved education away from mastery of knowledge and toward social consciousness — away from “What do students need to know?” and toward “What do students need to feel and believe?” The result, over decades, is a system that increasingly emphasizes activism over understanding, identity over competence, and critique over creation.

The Screen-Saturated Mind

At the same time Freirian pedagogy was reshaping classrooms, a second force was reshaping how people learn outside of them.

According to Common Sense Media, American teens now spend an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes per day on entertainment media — not counting school. The CDC reports that over 50% of teenagers ages 12–17 have four or more hours of daily screen time. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023 — a 40% decline in two decades (American Time Use Survey). Only 14% of 13-year-olds report reading for fun almost every day, down from 27% in 2012.

Americans now read an average of 12.6 books per year — the lowest Gallup has ever measured.

This is not just a change in medium. It is a change in the depth and structure of thought. Instagram, YouTube, and news feeds deliver fragments — opinions, reactions, summaries of summaries. Books and primary sources demand sustained attention, sequential reasoning, and the patience to hold complex ideas in mind long enough to understand them. Math requires exactly that kind of thinking.

When students spend most of their waking hours consuming content designed to be effortless, the mental habits required for real learning atrophy. The muscle weakens from disuse.

The Numbers Don't Lie

The convergence of ideology-driven teaching and screen-saturated living has produced measurable results:

• 45% of 12th graders scored below NAEP Basic in math in 2024 — the highest ever (NAEP, 2024).
• 40% of 4th graders are below Basic in reading — the most since 2002 (NAEP, 2024).
• 33% of 8th graders are below Basic in reading — the highest ever recorded (NAEP, 2024).
• 13-year-old reading scores are back to 1971 levels (NAEP Long-Term Trend, 2023).
• ACT composite scores hit 19.4 for the class of 2024 — the lowest in over 30 years (ACT, 2024).
• 43% of ACT test-takers met zero college-readiness benchmarks (ACT, 2023).
• The U.S. ranked 26th in math internationally, 110 points behind Singapore (PISA, 2022).

Despite $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery funding, the nation has not recovered. The bottom is still falling.

The Illusion of Progress

Meanwhile, the metrics that are supposed to measure learning tell a different story — one of apparent success.

The average high school GPA has risen from 2.68 in 1990 to 3.36 in 2021 (ACT). Graduation rates climbed from 80% in 2012 to 87% in 2022 (NCES). By these measures, students are doing better than ever.

But ACT found that nearly 60% of grades do not match the student's standardized test performance. Two-thirds of those mismatches are inflated — the grade is higher than what the student actually knows. The U.S. Department of Education has called grade inflation a “collective action problem.” Dartmouth found that standardized test scores are 2.4 times more predictive of college performance than high school GPA.

This is what happens when a system optimizes for looking good instead of being good. Grades go up. Graduation rates go up. And students walk out of school less prepared than ever, holding diplomas that represent completion rather than competence. We have built a system that rewards the appearance of learning while the substance of learning disappears beneath it.

What Thriving Actually Requires

If the goal of education is societal thriving — and it should be — then we need to be honest about what thriving requires.

A person thrives when they can achieve what they want in life. Not in some abstract philosophical sense, but practically: they can support themselves and their family, build something meaningful, solve problems that matter, and contribute to the people around them.

That capacity is directly proportional to the value they can create in the world. Value comes from doing things that other people find useful. The carpenter who builds a house. The engineer who designs a bridge. The nurse who knows exactly what to do in an emergency. The small business owner who solves a problem no one else bothered to solve. The teacher who makes a difficult subject clear.

Every one of these examples shares something in common: the person deeply understands how something works and can apply that understanding to make something useful. That understanding does not come from opinions, feelings about the material, or critiques of power structures. It comes from sustained study of the subject itself — its principles, its methods, its accumulated knowledge of what works and why.

This is what classical education has always understood.

The Classical Alternative

Classical education is built on a simple premise: there is a body of knowledge and a set of intellectual skills that, when mastered, equip a person to think clearly, learn independently, and contribute meaningfully to the world.

The classical model teaches students how to think by progressing through the trivium — grammar (foundational knowledge), logic (reasoning and analysis), and rhetoric (clear expression and application). It emphasizes primary sources over textbooks, depth over breadth, and mastery over coverage. Students read original works, grapple with difficult ideas, and build the habit of sustained attention that modern life actively undermines.

The results speak for themselves. Great Hearts Academies, the largest classical charter school network in the country, reports average SAT scores 220 points above the national average, a 98% college enrollment rate, and 51% of graduates pursuing STEM fields. In Arizona's 2021–22 state assessment, Great Hearts' 22 schools collectively earned an aggregate academic rating of 88.9, outperforming every other district and charter network in the Phoenix metro area.

Stanford's CREDO research center found that charter management organizations — which include classical networks — advance students by 27 additional days of learning in reading and 23 additional days in math per year compared to traditional public schools, with the strongest effects for historically underserved students.

Classical education works not because it is old, but because it is built on principles that are true regardless of era: that knowledge matters, that rigor produces capability, and that a well-trained mind is the most valuable thing a person can possess.

Our Duty as Educators

If education founded on what is known to work is the undeniable pillar of human thriving, then those of us who educate carry a serious responsibility.

It is not our job to make students feel a certain way about the world. It is our job to equip them to do something in it. Every student who graduates without real mathematical reasoning, without the ability to read difficult material and extract meaning, without the discipline to work through hard problems — that is a failure of the system, not the student.

And every time we inflate a grade, lower a standard, or replace rigorous content with something more comfortable, we are stealing from the very people we claim to serve. We are handing them a certificate that says “complete” while leaving them unable to compete.

The path forward is not more funding for the same approaches. It is not newer technology in service of the same shallow methods. The path forward is a return to what has always worked: teaching students real knowledge, demanding real mastery, and building the intellectual habits that make a person genuinely capable.

Why We Built LifeSchoolers

This is why LifeSchoolers exists.

We built LifeSchoolers to help families, students, and teachers truly grow their understanding of mathematics — not just complete assignments, but build the deep, structured knowledge that makes a person capable of doing real things in the world.

Math is one of the clearest examples of knowledge that works. It is the foundation of engineering, science, medicine, technology, finance, and countless trades. A student who genuinely understands mathematics — not just memorizes procedures but grasps why they work — has a tool that opens doors for the rest of their life.

That is why every problem on LifeSchoolers includes a step-by-step solution. Not just an answer, but an explanation of how to think through the problem. That is why we built automatic grading that gives immediate feedback — so students learn from mistakes in real time instead of moving on without understanding. That is why we cover topics from kindergarten counting through college calculus — because mathematical understanding is a continuous thread, and every stage matters.

We are not solving for completion. We are solving for comprehension. The difference matters more than most people realize, and it is the difference between an education that looks good on paper and one that actually equips a person to thrive.

Classical education teaches us that the hard path — the path of genuine mastery — is the only one that leads somewhere worth going. LifeSchoolers is our contribution to making that path accessible to every family that wants it.

Last updated: February 2026. Sources: NAEP / Nation's Report Card (2024), OECD PISA (2022), ACT (2023–2024), Common Sense Media (2021), CDC NCHS (2024), American Time Use Survey (2023), Gallup (2022), NCES, Stanford CREDO (2023), Great Hearts Academies, David Steiner & Susan Rozen (2003), Sol Stern / City Journal (2009), National Affairs, U.S. Department of Education.