'Soul-Deadening': Sasse Speaks Out Against ‘Abysmal’ Public School Results
by John Gage
Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse said the country’s public school system has failed kids in a speech he gave to a conservative think tank last week. Sasse’s remarks came during a keynote address to the Manhattan Institute’s 2026 Alexander Hamilton Awards dinner.
“Despite receiving nearly a trillion dollars per year, public K-12 education in America produces abysmal results,” Sasse said in the speech, which was released publicly on Monday. “Seventy percent of eighth graders are not proficient in reading, and more than 70% can’t do basic math. We have led the next generation on a path to more soul-deadening complacency, and this is the institution we’ve decided to outsource habit formation to?”
“Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults,” he added. Sasse said the only solution for the nation’s education crisis was for parents to step up.
“Schools, even much better schools, cannot solve this. Here’s the truth. Nobody loves your kids as much as you do,” he said.
Sasse has long sounded the alarm on the state of education in America. In his 2017 book “The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis,” Sasse warned of kids “coddled by well-meaning but misbegotten government programs” who would grow up to be “ill-equipped to survive in our highly-competitive global economy.”
According to a recent report, only 27% of Nebraska 8th graders are proficient in reading, while nationwide, 29% of 8th graders were proficient.
John Gage is the executive editor of The Plains Sentinel.