[Kaslin]

declining since 1916? You can’t be serious

[Kaslin]

I mean, I don’t disagree that is has been declining, but certainly not since 1916, more like since the the late 1960s

[556x45]

Ya, sort of what I was thinking. I would say it started during the 60s and has been in steady decline since.

[The_Reader_David]

The decline in education, not just in the US, but in at least the Anglosphere (if not the West as a whole) has been going on since well before the 1960's. C.S. Lewis's prophetic The Abolition of Man was written in 1943 and foresaw most of the rot in Western civilization on the basis of a bad English textbook used in British schools.

1916 is probably as good a start date as any -- right in the middle of the "Progressive" Era when the baleful ideas of Dewey that replaced the real education needed for citizenship with training for jobs came into vogue.

[Fiji Hill]

declining since 1916? You can't be serious

Irving Babbitt, author of Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton Miffiln, 1924) and other works would argue that the decline began even earlier.