September 2, 2025
A kindergarten teacher posted some comments on Facebook about her experience with some youngsters on their first days at her school.
“It broke my heart these past 4 days to see how many kindergarteners showed up to school with NO previous exposure to almost anything. It was so overwhelming for them to understand the concept of staying in line, wiping themselves, buttoning their own pants, opening a milk container, holding a pencil correctly.
“I had one who didn’t understand how to unzip his lunchbox so he could eat. Some can’t tell you their name, or don’t KNOW their actual given name that is on the roster. So many had never held a pencil at all, couldn’t sing the alphabet song (let alone recognize any letters/numbers), couldn’t count to ten or recognize shapes/colors.”
She expressed the frustration others show her, saying things like: “Isn’t that what school is for??” Or, “Why should parents have to do YOUR job for you?”
“Yes, school is for learning,” she said, “But when they come in SO far behind right off the bat, it is so defeating and frustrating for these babies. Even at the age of five, they recognize when they don’t know things other kids know. If a child knows who Pennywise the clown is and can recite every word (including the explicit ones) to the latest Cardi B song, but can’t recite the alphabet, count to ten, or open a ketchup packet, we got probs.”
Now to be realistic, there probably have been some young people like this for as long as there have been humans on the Earth. But apparently, the proportion of this type of unpreparedness for life’s basics has grown enormously.
In the old days, things that previously occurred at home started the learning process. Learning to dress ourselves, feed ourselves, follow rules and procedures, doing simple tasks. And when we got to kindergarten or first grade, or whatever the first “school” experience was, we had a functional basis to begin learning our ABCs, numbers and the other subjects that schools help us learn.
But the nuclear family that has been such an important part of America since its founding is dwindling away. Far too many single-parent families exist today, with many children growing up in a family with no father, or perhaps only a part-time dad.
And there seems to be a lack of understanding among adults about true parenting, the importance of proper and traditional child rearing. And, there is a substantial lack of knowledge about America’s story, and the culture upon which our country was built that parents would pass on to their children by interaction.
And so, we now find that many in the younger generations — Gen Z, Gen X, Gen Alpha, for example — have less and less of an understanding of the background that the older generations have always had. And with the decreased understanding of our founding and our development, we find a country with an ever-weakening sense of itself.
Our traditional values, institutions, arts, and morality are weakening. More and more we see family instability, materialism, entertainment saturation, and political division. We are losing our identity, our soul. We are committing cultural suicide.
Not only have we as a people failed to maintain our standards, but the ridiculous and dangerous virtual open border of the Biden administration, which invited millions of people — we still do not actually know how many — to enter the country illegally, has compounded the problem. This was done without having any idea of who these people were, or what their intent was.
Some of them were good people looking for a better life. But many others were drug and child traffickers, robbers, rapists, terrorists and murderers. And even those illegals who sought a better life were not oriented to the core values of America, which further diluted our cultural values.
Feelings about a cultural decline are not new. Former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett noted in an article in Education Week back in 1993 the following: “When the late Walker Percy was asked what concerned him the most about America’s future, he answered: ‘Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom ... gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.’”
At the end of the article, Bennett offers this: “The social regression of the past 30 years is due in large part to the enfeebled state of our social institutions and their failure to carry out their critical and time-honored tasks.”
Thirty-plus years past Bennett’s dire observations we find the country even further down the path to cultural collapse. Whether that direction can be reversed is a question yet to be answered.
