I think the future is even more bleak unless something can be done. The most recent national test scores showed that
we lost over 20 years of progress in our elementary schools. In math, we saw the first ever score drop since stats started being kept in 1973. Reading scores dropped by the largest margin since 1990.
Back in December 2019 was this article at left-leaning SLATE:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... ience.html. Even they had to acknowledge that, before disastrous dive of the most recent info, the once-mighty U.S. educational system was turning out barely mediocre results. In 2019, when we were still supposedly making progress, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, test results showed American 15-year-olds came in 8th out of 79 countries in reading, 11th in science, and a terrible 30th in math. A
New York Times article reported that, "About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old."
Declining fundamental skills in math, science, and reading are bad enough. But over the course of the past couple of decades our educational institutions have turned into institutions of political indoctrination. They aren't teaching basic American history and civics any longer, at least not as those of us born before around 1980 would recognize it. Research done a couple of years ago by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that
fewer than one-third of native-born Americans can correctly answer the most basic civics questions required of individuals to achieve U.S. citizenship.
Worse, what's being taught is colored by extreme-left politics and shaded by "wokeism." Our kids can't do basic math, read at their own grade levels, name the three branches of government, or know much of anything about the founding of our nation. But they know about George Floyd, about Greta Thunberg, about "white privilege," about how to virtue signal in all environments, and all about non-binary gender identity.
For our military, these are all lagging indicators. Big time. It's already happened; is still in progress. We'll always have some 18- and 19-year-olds from salt-of-the-earth families in "flyover country" who are capable, intelligent, morally upright, and who want to serve their country. But recruiting heroes is going to get even harder before it gets better. And right now, it looks like that next-generation crop of candidates is getting worse instead of better.