(End of the American Dream)—Our kids can’t really read very well. And it turns out that they aren’t very good at math either. But those running our system of education continue to tell us that they are doing a wonderful job. If they just had more funding, they insist, our test scores would go way up. Of course that is complete and utter nonsense. Our system of public education was a failure back when I was in school many years ago, and it is much worse now. At this point, only about one-third of all U.S. students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are proficient in reading…
In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that approximately one-third of students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are proficient in reading. The situation even gets worse for certain groups such as people from a different race, older generations, and those who belong to low-income groups.
So do you know what this means?
It means that approximately two-thirds of all students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are not proficient in reading.
Wow, that is really terrible.
And it is also being reported that 40 percent of our students “are essentially nonreaders”…
Biennial testing through NAEP consistently shows that two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency. An astounding 40 percent are essentially nonreaders. Most are taught through phonics—a system of instruction based on sounding out letters that is mandated in at least 32 states and the District of Columbia. The phonics method of converting each letter to a particular sound is totally unsuited to the English language. As but one example, e, the most common letter in print, has 11 different pronunciations (end, eat, vein, eye, etc.), including its role as the much-taught “silent e” (tape, cute, fine, etc.). This failure has been endemic from the early days of the country when Benjamin Franklin fought against phonics. The steady expansion of this mode of instruction will not fix the situation.
Isn’t that great?
We are headed for a future where approximately 40 percent of the entire population cannot even function in society.
In some areas of the country it is even worse.
In Chicago, only about one-sixth of all third graders are able to read at grade level…
About one-sixth of all third-grade students in Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. For low-income and minority students, the share of proficient readers is even lower.
They tax the living daylights out of us to fund these public schools.
So where is all of that money going?
One activist that was asked about the current state of affairs openly admitted that “the kids can’t read”…
“The kids can’t read – nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the NAACP in Oakland, California, who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue.
This is a national disgrace.
Of course our kids are not too good at math either.
In fact, U.S. students just established another all-time record low on an international exam…
American students scored an all-time low in math on a major international exam, which provided the first comparison of global achievement since the pandemic radically changed education around the world.
According to data released Tuesday, American 15-year-olds had a 13 point plunge out of 1000 on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exam, which was given last year to 620,000 students in 81 countries worldwide.
Yay for our public schools!
We are hitting levels that our students have never hit before!
But even though our students can’t read, write or do math very well, they just keep getting moved through the system year after year.
As long as you show up, you are going to pass.
We have become a “participation trophy society” where nobody is ever supposed to fail or feel bad about themselves.
This is true even at a formerly elite institution such as Yale University. At this point, nearly 80 percent of the grades that are given to undergraduates at Yale fall within “the A-range”…
A new report recently revealed that Yale University is apparently handing about grades in the A-range like they are candy. An estimated 78.97% of all the grades given to undergraduates at the prestigious university fell within the A-range.
The surprising development has left both students and faculty alarmed that high grades appear to have lost their value, according to the New York Times. Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor, said: “When we act as though virtually everything that gets turned in is some kind of A — where A is supposedly meaning ‘excellent work’ — we are simply being dishonest to our students.”
The grade report was put together by economics professor Ray Fair, who noted that the increase in grades started during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it has continued to rise since then, with students averaging a 3.70 GPA, up from 3.60 in 2013-2014. The details of the study were first shared with the Yale Daily News.
How bad do you have to be in order to get a “B” at Yale?
I would honestly like to know.
Of course this isn’t just happening at Yale. All over the nation, “good grades” have essentially become meaningless at our major colleges and universities.
Our kids have come to expect that “success” will just be handed to them, and as a result our system is pumping out millions of young adults that are just like this guy…
On an episode of Caleb Hammer’s YouTube show Financial Audit, 41-year-old Brent of Auston, Texas, reveals he has no steady job, no savings and relies on his parents to pay rent. But he refuses to accept work that’s “beneath” him.
“You’re being a baby,” Hammer told him after he confessed he turned down a job at a fast food restaurant. “Why will you not accept the jobs that you feel are slightly beneath you?”
Our system of education is theoretically supposed to be preparing our kids to face the real world, and that just isn’t happening.
The real world is not pleasant. It does not hand out participation trophies. In fact, there are times when the real world will pick you up and knock the breath out of you.
But now we have vast hordes of young people that cannot deal with the real world, and they are completely and utterly unprepared to deal with the extremely uncertain future that our society is now facing.
We don’t do our kids any favors by coddling them. They need to be challenged, and unfortunately our absolutely pathetic system of education is not challenging them at all.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.