The Problem With American Politics Doesn’t Start at Harvard

The public pays a lot of attention to what Harvard teaches its roughly 7,000 undergrads. It doesn’t spend enough on what over 50 million kids aren’t learning at all.

The Secretary of Transportation recently told his daughter on reality television that Harvard “can take good young girls” and “corrupt their minds,” coaxing them into dogmatically endorsing left-wing ideology.

Granted, tracking the rise of America’s tribalistic politics to one source is a difficult feat when there are so many potential factors: America’s stark urban-rural divide; our media landscape’s fragmentation; algorithmic bias towards extreme rhetoric. But it’s at the very least odd to blame elite universities for such a widespread phenomenon given that such a small fraction of Americans actually attend them.

Perhaps a greater source of fretting for those worried about political polarization should be a more neglected phenomenon of our educational system: K-12’s decline.

According to a report by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the U.S. has been in a “learning recession” since 2013. In 2024, the average 12th-grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reached their lowest point since at least 2005.

Most frighteningly, civics scores have stagnated: They have remained relatively unchanged since 1998, with an abysmal 22 percent of 8th graders scoring as proficient in 2022.

That said, one might argue that Americans still possess more quality knowledge about our world today than almost ever in our 250 year history; we no longer teach that bad air causes disease, for instance. It is the easiest it has ever been to read and learn about current events online.

The issue is that the standards have skyrocketed. In an age where we are continuously bombarded with misinformation on social media, the degree of critical thinking needed to detect bias and ascertain the truth is far higher than it was in the past.

Faulty political ideas are the natural product of insufficient education in an unforgiving informational landscape. It’s a core idea that traces back to the invention of political philosophy itself, in ancient Athens. When distinguishing what he called the correct or deviant forms of government ruled by the people, Aristotle contrasted between what he termed “Polity” and “Democracy,” respectively.

Aristotle thought of democracy as mob rule, an abuse of power for selfish ends by the many. The polity, meanwhile, was subject to legal constraints, enabling the government to serve the common good. It is what our system of government is derivatively based on.

For public rule to succeed, Aristotle stipulated that citizens must acquire practical wisdom through education, so they would not blindly follow those around them.

Subjects like reading and math develop the abstract thinking and analytical skills that work well for the rational evaluation of political platforms. They teach the academic skepticism that can ward off the most impractical ideas that cater toward emotional appeals at the expense of reason. Slogans like “build the wall,” “freeze the rent,” or “stop the steal” may get big reactions online, but quickly fall apart under logical scrutiny.

Crucially, K-12 education, unlike many sources of tribalism, is something we know how to improve. In fact, we have; one only has to look at the so-called “Mississippi Miracle,” in which several Southern states, driven by new educational policies adopted in the past decade or so, have catapulted from the bottom quintile of state education rankings to the top in reading and math. Their innovative initiatives have focused on updating pedagogy, raising standards, and individualizing support for struggling students.

So although higher test scores don’t directly temper political opinions, we have shown that we can improve our education system and equip students with the tools to be pragmatic, independent voters. That’s why we should act with some urgency to treat declines in K-12 education as a real threat to our country’s political fabric.

And maybe lay off Harvard for once.

Henry F. Haidar ‘28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is an Applied Math concentrator in Lowell House.