SCENES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Mediocrity on the march: A poster on kindness isn’t ‘critical thinking.’

When goals are mushy and impossible to measure, “anything goes,” writes Buck, a former teacher who’s now a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.

Nobody’s held accountable for whether students can add fractions or name the three branches of government if the standard of excellence is building a spaghetti tower.

“How can a school foster grit?,” he asks. “Maintain demanding academic gauntlets. How can schools create self-discipline? Set behavioral standards and hold students to them. How can schools enable critical thinking? Provide them the knowledge of history, science, literature, grammar, and the arts that become the tools of critical thought.”

Students don’t become”global citizens” — or just a plain old good citizens — “through kitschy activities where they make posters about how kindness is cool,” Buck concludes.

Yes, but they’re well on their way to septum rings and endorsing political violence on TikTok.