Kerby Anderson
One of the slogans we often hear from radical environmentalists is that there are too many people on the planet. Once someone makes that statement, it is worth asking, what do you propose we do about it?
Usually, they suggest we reduce the population by reducing the fertility rate. Of course, that has been happening in every developed country. As I mentioned in my December commentary, one of my professors in graduate school was a co-founder of Zero Population Growth.
But there are some who want to go far beyond zero population growth or even negative population growth. Professor Peter Singer (Princeton) seriously questioned years ago whether it was even “justifiable” for the human species to continue.
More recently you have a Finnish bioethicist explaining in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics that he “would be pleased to see no one have children, because that would be a rational thing to do. Reproducing carries risks to the possible future individuals.”
I recently did an interview with Wesley J. Smith, who discovered this article and talked about the current intellectual push for human extinction. I mentioned to him a commentary I wrote 16 years ago about a professor at the University of Texas who rejected the idea that humans have value. At the end of his speech, he proclaimed, “We’re no better than bacteria!”
That is not true. The Bible teaches that human beings are created in the image of God and have dignity and value. We are commanded to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the creation.
All of this push for human extinction reminds me of the famous quote from G.K. Chesterton. “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Kerby Anderson
In April 1983, the US Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration created the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The panel discovered that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Perhaps the most famous line from that report was this. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”
I read that line from the report on the radio the other day while doing an interview with Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. He quoted from that original study to emphasize that education hasn’t improved very much in the last 40 years since that dismal assessment.
He cited the NAEP, often known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” It documented that less than a third (29%) of 8th graders are proficient in reading and less than a third (29%) are proficient in math. The average scores from college exams have fallen the last six years in a row.
He explained that schools seem to be spending more and more valuable class time on wokeism. He gave many examples, but one of the most concerning is how federal money is being spent on younger and younger students. An organization called Woke Kindergarten trains teachers to “confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression, and remove those barriers to learning.”
No wonder that the latest Gallup poll shows just a quarter (26%) of respondents said they have a “great deal/fair amount” of confidence in our public schools. We have had an educational crisis for decades. It is time to address this chronic problem.