Most parents and many educators understand that there is a crisis in education. We have more public education in the West than ever before, yet it seems we have more dumbed-down kids than ever. Plenty of indoctrination and propaganda occurs in our schools, but real learning? Not so much.
Here I offer a reading list of some key books on this topic that are worth being aware of. They range from the 1940s right up until today. I follow this with quotes from two of the most recent volumes on the education wars.
Books
The 41 volumes listed here cover most aspects of education. Some are written by Christians, and some by non-Christians. Some are Australian titles, and some are American or English titles. One aspect I have not covered here is the whole issue of homeschooling, of which there are so many important books now available.
Bennett, William, Our Children & Our Country: Improving America’s Schools & Affirming the Common Culture. Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Black, Jim Nelson, Freefall of the American University: How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation. Thomas Nelson, 2004.
Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoversihed the Soul of Today’s Students. Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Blumenfeld, Samuel, Is Public Education Necessary? The Paradigm Company, 1981, 1985.
Blumenfeld, Samuel and Alex Newman, Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children. WND, 2015.
d’Abrera, Bella, Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation. Wyborn Press, 2026.
Donnelly, Kevin, Dumbing Down. Hardie Grant Books, 2007.
Donnelly, Kevin, Why Our Schools are Failing. Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004.
D’Sousa, Dinesh, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Free Press, 1991.
Gunn, Colin and Joaquin Present, eds., Indoctrination: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity. Master Books, 2012.
Hasson, Mary Rice and Theresa Farnan, Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late. Regnery, 2018.
Horowitz, David, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. Encounter Books, 2009.
Horowitz, David, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy. Crown Forum, 2009.
Horowitz, David, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Regnery 2007.
Horowitz, David, Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For an Academic Bill of Rights. Regnery 2010.
Kimball, Roger, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. HarperCollins, 1990.
Kirkpatrick, David, Choice in Schooling: A Case for School Vouchers. Loyola University Press, 1990.
Kjos, Berit, Brave New Schools. Harvest House, 1995.
Kors, Alan Charles, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty On America’s Campuses. Harper Paperbacks, 1999.
Laverdiere, C, ed., Indoctrination: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity. Master Books, 2012.
Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man. Macmillan, 1947, 1965.
Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin, 2018.
Marsden, George, The Soul of America’s University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief. Oxford University Press, 1994, 1996.
Mosbacker, Barrett, ed., School Based Clinics: And Other Critical Issues in Public Education. Crossway. 1987.
Moschella, Melissa, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children’s Autonomy. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Neuhaus, Richard John, ed., Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education. Eerdmans, 1987.
Newman, Alex, Indoctrinating Our Children to Death: Government Schools’ War on Faith, Family, & Freedom – And How to Stop It. Liberty Sentinel Press, 2024.
Ravitch, Diane, The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crisis of Our Time. Basic Books, 1985.
Reilly, Wilfred, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. Broadside Books, 2024.
Ridgley, Stanley, Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. Humanix, 2023.
Roche, George, The Balancing Act: Quota Hiring in Higher Education. Open Court, 1974.
Roche, George, The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding, Corruption, and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education. Regnery, 1994.
Rushdoony, Rousas John, The Messianic Character of American Education. The Craig Press, 1963.
Shapiro, Ben, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. Thomas Nelson, 2004.
Sowell, Thomas, Education: Assumptions Versus History. Hoover Press, 1986.
Sowell, Thomas, Inside American Education. Free Press, 1992, 2003.
Stefanik, Elise, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities. Threshold Editions, 2026.
Thoburn, Robert, The Children Trap: Biblical Principles for Education. Christian Liberty Press, 1986.
Vitz, Paul, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks. Servant Books, 1986.
Wilson, Doug, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. Crossway, 1991.
Wilson, Doug, ed., Repairing the Ruins: The Classical and Christian Challenge to Modern Education. Canon Press, 1996.
Quotes
I feature just two key quotes, both from brand-new books, the first volume from Australia and the second from America.
d’Abrera
We have arrived at a stage in Western Civilisation in which sending our children to school is no longer a guarantee that they will emerge literate, numerate, or with enough knowledge of the world to successfully navigate life. The foundations of education have been deliberately removed from the curriculum and replaced with indoctrination. By the time they finish school in the public education system, your children will not be able to fill out a tax return or recite lines from Shakespeare, but they will certainly be able to lecture you on the patriarchy, systemic racism, the dangers of farting cows, and how to be a transgender ally.
Schools across the West have been transformed from centres of instruction into purveyors of dogma. Teachers are preying on the natural iconoclasm of children to instil in them a range of deranged theories about sex, gender, race, and history. These ideas have been de rigueur among university academics for decades and are now the unquestionable orthodoxy on campuses in the West. Our universities are no longer in the business of imparting knowledge. Rather, as Alan Bloom foresaw in America in the 1980s, they are now closing young minds across the Western world.
This is where the rot begins. Almost all future schoolteachers attend university faculties and have comprehensively embraced the new ideology with religious fervour. Critical race theory, queer theory, gender theory, postcolonial theory, critical disability theory, intersectionality, identity politics, decolonialisation, and ecocentrism now form the basis of the global education system which has been rolled out across the Anglosphere. If you had to design an educational system to wreak maximum damage on generations of people, this would be it, because it is founded on the toxic idea that all of life is defined by an oppressor/oppressed binary. (pp. 9-10)
Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universitiesby Stefanik, Elise (Author)
Stefanik
In less than one year, because of the higher education oversight work of Congress, the Trump administration has reached or is in talks to reach many multi-hundred-million-dollar settlements with universities in the Ivy League and beyond.
Parents and college students are also voting with their feet and their wallets. They’re abandoning the poisoned Ivies and so-called elite academia for sunnier, politically friendlier, and more affordable destinations. What’s happening right now is the most important moment in American higher education in generations. These schools proved incapable of fixing themselves. But under pressure from the federal government and from the self-inflicted mistakes of a forced radical ideology, American higher education, especially elite academia, is being transformed.
Why did the hearing garner so much attention—not just from politicians and academics, but everyone from pop culture icons to everyday Americans? Why did so many people—people who had never watched a second of congressional testimony before—watch this, post it, share it?
I believe it’s because the university presidents’ answers summed up something ordinary Americans have known for a long time. Our elite higher educational institutions, founded on timeless academic aspirations, are now fundamentally broken. They have fundamentally lost their way. They’ve succumbed to decades of moral decay, academic laziness, and radical groupthink. They’ve become hollow, empty, soulless. And so have their leaders. When the opportunity came to speak truth clearly and courageously, the leaders of some of our most coveted institutions failed. They acted like a brainwashed herd, all trotting out the same lawyerly verbiage and bureaucratic talking points. They exposed the moral bankruptcy that has rotted these institutions from the inside out. These once-great institutions, many of which predate the founding of our nation, have fallen so far from their founding missions.
This book is a deep dive into what happened on the most storied American campuses in the aftermath of October 7th. These elite schools, revered for their rich history and important contributions to our nation’s identity, were among the worst offenders propelling the scourge of antisemitism. The events in question were a seminal turning point in higher education. This book investigates how we got here and charts the path ahead to save American higher education.
Americans want, and deserve, better. Americans want clear moral leadership. They want institutions that embody and strive for academic excellence, prize independent thinking, value basic decency, prioritize American students, and that are not anti-American and anti-West. Americans want academic exceptionalism, not indoctrination.
This was never about a few presidents or a few universities. It’s not just about antisemitism.
It’s about saving American higher education, because it has proven incapable of saving itself. (pp. 19-20)
