by William Bronson 19 Sept 2026
What does a person do when he sets out to reform a beloved American institution? The public schools of America were once the pride of our nation, the mechanism for the melting pot of our society. It thrived on our national pride of welcoming people from all over the world who sought better lives in the land of opportunity,
Unfortunately, our society has devolved into a cultural fist fight with all segments throwing whatever is at hand at each other with malicious intent. Our public school system has also devolved into attempts at stopping the brawling. How did we get this way?
Any attempt to reform a system has to begin by recognizing a problem. The problem with public schools in America is obvious. Literacy rates have fallen dramatically and behavior has become abysmal. While eighty percent of young people are trying to get an education in public schools, the crime, addictions, and behavior, even suicides among students is depressingly high. Depression and a sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness abound.
How did this happen and who is at fault? The usual culprits to blame are cell phones, the entertainment industry, materialism, and a precipitous decline in morals and manners. But I would argue that these are symptoms not causes.
So what are the causes? I am unwilling to enter the blame game. Teachers are doing their best to stop this tide of disfunction. Administrators and support staff are also doing their best as reflected in the amount of monetary and other resources directed toward solutions. I would argue that the sources of the problems are missing ingredients in our curricula- Ancient Wisdom.
Let me give you an analogy. NFL teams have recently been exploring the connection between performance and diet. Tom Brady and his former wife Gisele Bundchen put a high priority on what they ate. When you want top performance from your body, many top athletes will tell you it is important how you eat.
I would argue that key ingredients are missing in what we feed the hearts and souls of our young people in public schools. School lunches, junk food, and soda machines don’t help their bodies and minds much either.
But when I say the missing ingredients are Ancient Wisdom, I am not only referring to our curriculum of the same name, but its contents.
Let me give you an example. The current fight over whether schools in Texas are out of line by wanting to hang copies of the Ten Commandments on their walls is an issue worth reflecting on. The argument against is that it appears to be an endorsement of a particular religion, either Judaism and/or Christianity. The Supreme Court has ruled that public schools cannot promote or denigrate any particular religion. But its opinions also allow for the study of certain religious texts for their importance to history, literature, government, philosophy or other secular interests. That is why our curriculum is within bounds when we encourage polite discussion of the ten commandments, for example, as a source of ancient wisdom. Most people, although challenged to name more than three of the ten, would agree that it is not a bad idea to refrain from murder, adultery, stealing, and lying. On the other hand, coveting has become a national pastime. And honoring one’s parents isn’t particularly high on young people’s list of things to do. Sabbath keeping is long gone and Sunday has become a hay day of activity of all kinds to the detriment of our national physical and mental health.
Other examples of ancient wisdom are Jesus’ admonitions to love one’s neighbor, forgive one another, and walk in humility. Currently psychologists have recognized how detrimental to mental health is the nurturing of grudges. One can imagine a much better world where these virtues were widespread.
Our curriculum surveys world religions and most agree that these are universal values embraced worldwide.
The missing ingredients in our curricula are the babies thrown out with the bath water. The bath water being the attempt to turn our public schools into doctrinaire religion factories. The babies are the invaluable virtues that most religions admire.
Because of ill-advised overreach by some religious fanatics to extend their “faith” into public schools, the courts put them down. But because school districts feared litigation, they over reacted and threw out the helpless and healthy babies, the discussion of healthy virtues.
A public school sponsoring prayer is a disallowed over reach and justifiably so. But to discourage private, personal, quiet prayer is a violation of our first amendment rights. Decades ago, when transcendental meditation was a fad, it was ok because it wasn’t Christian but more Buddhist, until the courts shut TM down. But if we ever needed to encourage students to connect with their “higher power”, it is now.
So let’s try together to re-introduce polite discussions of universal ethics, values, morals, and manners back into our public schools and tap into ancient wisdom so that young people can connect with ideas that have proven to be valuable to people’s mental and physical health over the centuries.