Education wars are now all around us, with woke and leftist ideology running most schools and education departments. Students are getting dumbed down in all the basics, while coming out as dedicated leftists and haters of the West.
In recent articles I have examined two books on how Western education is going down the tubes, and what can be done about it. Both books are brand-new releases; both look at the woke takedown of our educational system; both offer numerous examples of this; and both trace the ways in which the education wars have come about.
The differences are that Elise Stefanik looks just at the American situation, with special reference to how antisemitism has flourished in our top universities, while Bella d’Abrera looks at things more broadly. And being based here in Australia, she looks at the nation in some detail, along with what is happening in America and the UK.
Here I offer a few choice quotes from each as they seek to explain why and how our school and education policies have gotten so bad.
Stefanik, Elise, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities (Threshold Editions, 2026)
In just six short paragraphs the American Congresswoman nicely lays out the main reasons why our prestige universities have been in serious decline over recent decades. She writes:
Over the last several chapters we’ve related the stories of American Jewish students and faculty on our college campuses since October 7, 2023. What they have been through has in many cases been harrowing and horrifying. In every case, it has been disgusting and un-American. But the rise of antisemitism on college campuses was the culmination of a much broader moral and academic rot in American higher education. It was a symptom of a deep-seated decay that has been happening at elite universities for decades.
These schools were once important institutions for invention, inquiry, research, development, scientific exploration, artistic achievements, and societal advancement. An elite American college education was the envy of the world and a near guarantor of the American Dream. Yet today, American higher education has fundamentally lost its way. The most important questions are Why? and How? Why did our country’s campuses become cesspools of antisemitism? How did this happen? What went wrong?
First, radical left-wing political ideology is now synonymous with higher education. Universities are monocultures, where faculty, staff, and administrators operate like a herd. Where there’s division in the ranks, it’s almost always very Far Left faculty fighting with slightly less Far Left faculty. This problem only grows worse over time, because ideology is fiercely policed through the tenure system, which enables radical senior faculty to hire even-more-radical junior faculty. It also manifests in the batty curricula that can be found in classrooms across American universities. What is actually being taught in our schools has shifted away from academically rigorous coursework toward political and social indoctrination, filled with endless buzzwords and moral relativism. Training in “the best that has been thought and said” has given way to endless electives, where English majors can graduate without having read Shakespeare or Chaucer (as is now the case at Harvard), or history majors can avoid ever having to study the Middle Ages or the Reformation (also Harvard).
Second, the insidious Woke Revolution that culminated in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) agenda insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the university in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wokeness was not just another notch in the left-wing ratchet. It was a pseudo-religious movement, and everyone had to bend the knee. DEI reshaped admissions, hiring, the classroom, student life—nothing was allowed to go untouched. “Cancel culture” came not just for the rebels who actively resisted the DEI regime but for innocent professors and students who simply ran afoul of the new dogma of the Woke Left. The purpose of DEI was not to advance racial equality; it was to put a new, radical class in power and establish a culture of fear and racism that would keep dissenters in line.
Third, there has been a historic demographic shift. Elite institutions have deprioritized American students and dramatically increased their attention to foreign students. Part of that is ideological: students need to be “global citizens,” the schools insist. But the main driver is—let’s be frank—financial: elite universities are competing with each other for access to deep foreign pockets. Countries like China and Qatar are dangling enormous sums of money in front of American universities, and no one can resist. Of course, the result is that foreign donors, including adversarial governments, now have a meaningful say in what happens at American universities, from admissions to curricula to hiring to student discipline.
Finally, the failed governance structure of universities has allowed university presidents to plumb the moral abyss with little accountability. University Boards, which are supposed to be guarding the long-term interests of the university, have largely absented themselves from determining the direction of these institutions. Most university trustees are happy enough to be invited to dinners, have their names and big letters on donor lists, and enjoy premium seats at football games. They don’t want to make the hard decisions of governing. But without hands-on trustees, universities will continue to spin out of control. (pp. 133-135)
Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universitiesby Stefanik, Elise (Author)
d’Abrera, Bella, Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation (Wyborn Press, 2026)
In Chapter 8 of her helpful volume, “The State Wants Your Child,” she speaks of how an insatiable hunger for statist control, coupled with parental abandonment of their own children, has brought about much of our current mess. Parents have abdicated their responsibility to be the primary carer and educator of their children, and have “relinquished their duties to the state” (p. 238)
She looks at some of the historical and ideological reasons for this:
How did this collective abnegation of responsibility happen? Why have we let the state jostle into first position when it comes to child rearing? The answer lies with our old friends, Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire. Each man, in his own distinct way, contributed to the erosion of the family, which is the building block of society, by driving a wedge between parent and offspring, and leaving a gap into which the establishment has been quick to insert itself.
In Emile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau removes the little boy from his corrupting parents (the biggest corruptor of all being his mother!) and hands him over to a tutor. Rousseau planted the seed that children should be entrusted to the intellectual elite for their formation. Later, John Dewey would water that seed with his progressive vision that education was not about transmitting knowledge or faith from parent to child, but about preparing the child for political life. The home was not central but was incidental, perhaps even obstructive. The school, by contrast, became the surrogate parent, better aligned with the needs of the state and the future, than with the parochial loyalties of the family. By the time we arrive at Paulo Freire, the mission has become overtly revolutionary. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, education is all about ‘consciousness-raising’. The child is not to be nurtured but awakened, stirred into political struggle, questioning all forms of authority: religious, cultural, familial. Parents are no longer to be thought of as guides, but as potential agents of the oppressive system.
Fast forward to the twenty first century and we find the heirs of this movement claiming that parents never even had any rights over their children in the first place. According to some academics, parental rights are ‘fiction’, and that the only thing that should be afforded to them by law is a revocable ‘child-rearing privilege’. The state, they say, has both the right and the duty to override parents in order to instil the ‘substantive values it deems essential’. In the UK, the Children Act 1989 deliberately replaced talk of ‘parental rights’ with the softer notion of ‘parental responsibility’. The same move is reinforced by the UN, whose Convention on the Rights of the Child elevates the child’s ‘best interests’ above parental authority, a principle that, in practice, places ultimate decision-making power in the hands of bureaucrats rather than mothers and fathers. (pp. 241-243)
She offers various examples of this, including this from Australia:
In some states, schools are legally permitted to socially transition a student without ever informing the family, provided the child is deemed ‘mature minor’ by a principal or teacher. They do not have to undergo a psychological assessment, and there is no external oversight. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission and state education departments have issued guidance suggesting that student autonomy and privacy can outweigh parental rights. And the repercussions of this state-sanctioned secrecy are not insignificant, for it pits sons and daughters against their mothers and fathers, disturbing the precious unity of the family. (p. 245)
Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisationby d'Abrera, Dr Bella (Author)
The war on Western education is really a war on the West. These two books are well worth getting, whether or not you have children or grandchildren.
