Despite all sorts of innovative plans implemented in the American school system over the past 30 years, American education is in deep trouble. We need to figure out why kids aren’t motivated more, wrote Jim Clifton and Marguerite Kondracke in the Washington Times yesterday. How bad is it? The article continued:

Today, America is the only industrialized nation in the world where children are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents. A student drops out of high school every 26 seconds, 1.2 million children each year. Three in 10 students fail to graduate with their class, a percentage that doubles for minority, urban and low-income students.

Even among those who do graduate, noted Clifton and Kondracke, “many are unprepared for college or a career.”

This is a national concern, said the authors (emphasis ours throughout):

This country cannot succeed in the global marketplace without an educated workforce. Simply put, the high school dropout and college-readiness crisis is the greatest long-term threat to our economic security and moral authority as a nation.

Identifying the problem is one thing. What about solving the crisis? “If we want to leave our children a better world than the one we inherited, where a quality public education is a fundamental right, we must ask them what that future looks like,” they said.

In actual fact, what our children need most is for adults—parents, pastors, teachers, employers—to accept full responsibility for training up children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6). God, after all, is much more than Creator—He is mankind’s educator.

But we have drifted so far from God, it’s no wonder our educational system is broken. Today, it’s difficult to find adults who are actively applying the laws of success, obeying the Ten Commandments and submitting to God’s authority in their lives.

For more on the missing dimension in modern education, read Education With Vision.