From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I was truly disappointed in this book. I had hoped for a lot more, but at only 4% in I came across a list of problems that purportedly needed addressing, and discovered that the list was not only out of date, but inaccurate as presented by the author. She writes, "The 1990s carried some scary trends and statistics" and yet offers nothing to support this statement. Instead she gives a list which I reproduce below, annotated by me. The only link she offers to support these assertions goes not to a list of references or statistics, but to a paper by Thomas Lickona, part of which she lifts to create her list below.
The problem with Lickona's paper is that he makes no better or really any different argument to what this author makes and the references he lists are all dated 1993 or earlier! They really have nothing to do with "the nineties"! Even had they related, I don't see any connection being made between what he says was happening then, and what this author is advocating now in a book published fully thirty years after the start of the nineties. Let's look at the items she lists. My comments are from searches online verified by at least two sources and are not hard to find for anyone interested in actually supporting or refuting claims like these.
- A rise in youth violence While there was a rise in violence, fueled, it seems from youth crime, it peaked in 1994 and then tapered off.
- Increase in dishonesty in academics and society It's hard to find good information on this, but cheating was high before the nineties which experienced only a small rise as far as I could discover.
- Disrespect for authority How do you measure that? I couldn't find anything relevant online.
- Bullying Increased racial tensions & bigotry on campusA 2014 report covering the previous two decades and summarizing data from five national surveys, has bullying declining, not rising. Racial tensions have been rising very recently and we all know who started the bigotry, racist politics, homophobia, misogyny and general disrespect for anyone and anything that doesn't fall in line with his narrow-minded PoV. He should never be allowed to hold any public position ever again.
- Work ethic decline Again hard to determine. While anecdote suggests worth ethic has been declining, the fact remains that after a slump, the US economy grew in the 1990s, so lots of people were actually working hard! It's not easy to square that with a claim that work ethic is declining.
- Promiscuity and teen pregnancy (US had the highest rates of pregnancy & abortion) This is flatly wrong. Teen pregnancy rate peaked in 1990 and has been on a decline ever since. With regard to promiscuity, how is that defined exactly? More than one partner? More than five? What? Decades-long trends back to World War One show women evidencing an increased number of sexual partners (but hardly what any reasonable person would describe as promiscuous) in line with their increasing freedom, while men's partner count has been on a decline since World War Two. The percentage of US adults having a positive attitude toward premarital sex was about 40% at the start of the 1990s, and about 50% at the start of the 2000's. That's hardly a meteoric rise.
- Lack of civic responsibility & overabundant self-centeredness Again look who was president over the last four years prior to 2021, but this has nothing to do with schooling or with the 1990s.
- Self-destructive behavior Defined how, exactly? There's a separate line item for suicide and one for homicide, so what does "self-destructive behavior" actually mean? Cutting? Incarceration? What? This reference: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/DimRet.pdf has it that "In the seven-year period 1991-98 the overall rate of crime declined by 22%, violent crime by 25%, and property crime by 21%" During this time incarceration increased significantly. If that's what's meant, why not specify it?
- Decreased knowledge & practice of ethics Again undefined and unsupported.
- Male homicide rates soared for 15 to 24-year-olds (40X higher than Japans) No! Homicide rates declined sharply from 1991 thru 2010: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf , but what's with the exaggerated comparison with Japan? The USA rate is higher than lots of other places. Why mention Japan?
- Increased drug use (US highest again) Drug use has been dropping since the mid-1990's
- Astounding youth suicide rates (tripled) This reference flatly refutes a tripling of suicides of any group in the US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1586156/
Given that nearly all of these claims parroted from Lickona by the author are outright wrong or exaggerated or misrepresented when applied to the nineties, and at any rate are completely irrelevant in the 21st century without more recent research to back them up, I see no point in mentioning them in this book!
For the author to then leap to the claim that her book offers ways to set this right is frankly mind-boggling given how out of date these "statistics" are. Do any of these problems still exist today, almost two generations of school students later?! Are they declining or increasing? Are there other, more recent issues that we ought to focus on instead of, or as well as, these? In all seriousness, I cannot commend a book built upon such a haphazard and dated foundation regardless of what value the rest of it may or may not offer, and I have no intention of reading further when the book starts out mired in such a morass of questionable 'facts'.
