Thursday, October 16, 2025
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
4.8 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s edition of The Briefing, Dr. Mohler discusses the great education regression in the U.S., the Left’s attack on Mississippi’s successful model for education, and the growing skepticism in the U.S. towards higher education.
Part I (00:14 – 08:10)
The Great Education Regression: 49 Out of 50 States Report Increased Gap Between Top 10% and Bottom 10% of Students
- America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy by The Atlantic (Idrees Kahloon)
The “Mississippi Miracle”: The Left Attacks Mississippi’s Successful Education Model, Including Its Lack of Teacher Unions
Part III (20:54 – 27:47)
Americans are Skeptical of Higher Education: Is Higher Ed Headed in the Wrong Direction?
- Growing share of Americans say the U.S. higher education system is headed in the wrong direction by PEW Research Center (Kim Parker)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Thursday, October 16, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. |
| 0:14.0 | America is sliding towards illiteracy. That's the headline and a very important essay published yesterday at the Atlantic. It's by Idris |
| 0:21.9 | Kalun. And it talks about declining standards and low expectations, which, according to this |
| 0:27.8 | report, are destroying American education. Okay. Now, panic over education is not new. Panic over |
| 0:33.7 | education was true of the ancient Greeks. It was true of the ancient Romans. It's true of the |
| 0:38.7 | Victorians. It's true, certainly, of the last half of the 20th century. But in most cases, it's also |
| 0:43.9 | justified. And one of the things we just need to pause and say right from the get-go is that |
| 0:49.1 | as Christians, we understand that education is, first of all, one of the most important responsibilities of a society, |
| 0:56.7 | one of the most important responsibilities for Christian parents, one of the most important |
| 1:00.8 | priorities for an entire civilization. And by the way, whatever the education is, that's what the |
| 1:05.8 | civilization will soon be. It's also important to understand that we have really messed up education in this |
| 1:13.0 | country for a matter of successive generations. And thus, the educational panic that emerged in the |
| 1:18.2 | 1940s and 50s has given way to the educational panic that we know now. And by the way, |
| 1:23.8 | there are two very different panics. The big concern at the end of World War II in educational |
| 1:29.3 | panic is that American kids are getting behind Soviet kids in terms of education. Now, a part of that |
| 1:36.6 | was just propaganda, but at the same time, the United States had some very big wake-up calls |
| 1:42.3 | after World War II and in the midst of the Cold War. |
| 1:44.8 | The most famous of those wake-up calls was named Sputnik. There in the late 1950s, a wake-up call to the |
| 1:50.6 | United States that it wasn't just propaganda. The Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. in the space race. |
| 1:57.3 | Now, almost immediately, that led to the huge question, how are our kids being prepared for a world in which we need spacecraft and orbiting satellites and missiles and all the rest? |
| 2:08.9 | And thus, you had a massive turn towards science and applied science in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. |
| 2:15.6 | You had other panics that came later, but as we're going to see, |
... |
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