By Jugraj Singh MD, MHA

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” –Mark Twain

During the China-USA summit (May 14-15, 2026), President Xi remarked that America is a declining power, and President Trump agreed. What has caused America to decline?

Americans are made arrogant, ignorant, and anti-intellectual by design. The ruling capitalist elite have designed the American education system to ensure that most Americans fail and become lackluster, mediocre underachievers so that the elite minority can continue to control, govern and manipulate them. I will share my experiences within the American education system to show how the education system is designed to fail most students.

Much can be learned about one’s behavior and character from their name. America and US, when rearranged, form ME ICAARUS (Icarus), the foolish boy from the Greek tragedy who, due to his arrogance and hubris (foolish pride) flew too close to Helios (the Sun God) while escaping from the island prison where he and his father were unjustly imprisoned. Helios melted the glue with which Icarus’s feathers were attached and he fell into the sea and drowned.

Many American friends have recommended the Hollywood movie Idiocracy (2006) to understand what America’s future will look like. Already, President Trump, an American TV and film star (The Apprentice and cameos in films) has similarity to Idiocracy’s celebrity American President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. 

My high school did not get Advanced Placement (A.P.) classes until I was a Junior (eleventh grade). In Junior year, one A.P. class was introduced: A.P. U.S. History. In Senior year (twelfth grade), three additional A.P. classes were introduced: A.P. Calculus (taught as Calculus Honors), A.P. English Literature and Composition, and A.P. U.S. Government. The year after I graduated high school, more A.P. classes were offered, such as A.P. science and foreign language classes. I took all of the A.P. classes that were available.

I graduated in the top 10 percentile of my class and knew the other students who were in the top 10 percentile. In all of the A.P. classes, most of the students were from the top 10 percentile. Our A.P. U.S. History teacher, Mr. Lambert, was a very accomplished man. He was originally from the South and was half Cherokee and half white American, a Lieutenant Colonel who had served in the Vietnam War, an Army Ranger who was selected for Delta Force, and a scholar athlete: Mr. Lambert once told me that in high school, he was Quarterback of the football team and President of the Chess Team. 

Mr. Lambert’s family was also very academically gifted. Mr. Lambert’s daughter went to high school in Michigan and the entire curriculum could be taken with A.P. classes, which she did. Since A.P. classes are weighed higher than non-A.P. classes, Mr. Lambert’s Daughter graduated as Valedictorian with an unheard of 5.0 out of a 4.0, and she scored a perfect ACT score and a 1580 out of 1600 on the SAT.

Our class consisted of 1 African American student, 1 Korean American student, 2 Jewish American students and 10 white American students. The class was taught very much like a college class and the textbook which we used (Liberty, Equality, Power) was a college-level textbook with many more chapters and pages than high school textbooks and a smaller font.

Mr. Lambert liked to ask trivia questions at the beginning of class and he would give out special hershey’s chocolates to those students who answered correctly. One question which stumped the class and which I answered correctly was in which city did the 2001 World Conference against racism take place (Durban, South Africa). 

I used to regularly watch BBC World News with my Father and also discuss and type his articles, and he had written about the World Conference in Durban. I answered so many questions correctly and ended up eating so many chocolates that for the first time in my life, one of my teeth had a cavity! 

One girl in my class, A1, was a straight-A student and her Mom was a teacher and her Dad was the girl’s basketball and volleyball coach. Mr. Lambert asked her which political party President Bill Clinton belonged to and she had no clue. I learned a difficult lesson from observing her wrong answers that her straight-As were due to a racket in which teachers give the children of other teachers undeserved “easy As.”

Within the social system created by elites, intelligence and intellect are not qualities worth having or showing. Most of the girls who were in the top 10 percentile were embarrassed of their intelligence and intellect and would often downplay them by acting clumsy or even dumb around popular and athletic students so that they would be liked by them.

From observing the wrong answers of other students, I learned that American students (particularly white American students) have a very poor understanding of international politics, current world events and non-western world history. Most of the other top 10 percentile students in my class were not very intelligent or intellectual; they had learned to game the system by befriending smart students who would do their homework and share the right answers with them. When these students were challenged intellectually, they would very often fail. 

This easy A racket also happened in medical school. I attended University of Washington School of Medicine. One of my class fellows, D, was the son of a Clinical Director who is highly placed within the Medical University System. D was an average student and there was nothing remarkable about his academic performance. Our first two years were mostly basic science courses and similar to undergraduate science courses. Our final two years were clinical rotations. D was able to get Honors passes (the highest grade) in all of the clinical rotations not because he was extraordinary, but only because of academic corruption due to his Father’s position.

Some teachers did teach us to love and pursue knowledge and strengthen intellect. My Calculus Honors teacher, Mr. Johnson, is a brilliant and truly gifted teacher. He attended the University of Washington, majored in Oceanography and aspired to become a medical doctor. He was drafted for the Vietnam War. Such was the terrible effect of the war on him that he gave up his dream of becoming a doctor.

Mr. Johnson taught our class three new vocabulary words every week and we had a test at the end of the year on them. He had a poster in his classroom titled “When Chief Seattle Spoke” and I would look at that poster many times. Mr. Johnson always sat outside and read a book during lunch hour. He would put it to a vote whether or not to read a weekly column by a comedian-writer Dave Barry which appeared in the local newspaper every Tuesday, “Dave or no Dave?” to which the students would reply emphatically “Dave!”

Mr. Johnson would also read short stories to the class. Once he read a story about the Mesopotamian Human-Bull hybrid God Enkidu. I was quite surprised since I had read the same story on my own in the library. Mr. Johnson read Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” to us and it was his theory that the boy’s uncle was the Father of the baby (his reasons were that the Uncle accompanied his brother to the Indian Camp, gave out cigars at the birth of the baby, and the supposed Native American father committed suicide during or after the baby’s birth). This was particularly funny because my English teacher, Mrs. Rowden, also covered this short story in class at the same time and she did not think that the Uncle was the Father!

At the end of the year, our school organized a Senior Excursion trip to Seattle. Mr. Johnson was one of the teachers who chaperoned us. We went to the Pacific Science Center, Seattle Aquarium, downtown Seattle, Gameworks videogame arcade and the Seattle waterfront. In class, we played “baseball” in which two players had to answer a trivia question correctly and the fastest, three correct answers in a row led to a homerun.

The game was between boys and girls. The prize was that if the boys won, the girls would have to pay for a pizza party and if the girls won, two boys would have to get makeup done by the girls and be paraded through the high school. Here again, lack of intellectual depth became obvious. The girls were winning and almost no boy scored a homerun. I was the only homerun scorer for the boys. Every time that it was my turn, I scored a homerun. The girls won in the end.

After graduation, Mr. Johnson took me and three other class fellows rock climbing at the Feathers near Vantage, Washington, a very famous landscape popular for rock climbing. Mr. Johnson played a funny song in his car “Euro-Trash Girl” by Cracker (2000). I did not know what a Euro-Trash girl was at the time. Wikipedia explains Euro-Trash as a term for certain Europeans. I know it to mean an American girl, since Americans are unfortunately, Euro-Trash.  

From a very young age, Americans are taught arrogance and hubris (like Icarus) in the form of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. American Exceptionalism teaches students that “Americans are number 1” and to consider themselves superior to every other human being on planet earth. Manifest Destiny is this ignorant and racist propaganda that the colonizers had a divine right to massacre and exploit indigenous populations, take their land by force, and force them onto reservations. Such education is designed to make American students arrogant and ignorant. 

It is this learned behavior which has made Americans both blindly support and fall victim to the propaganda against third world countries, to justify the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and support massacres against innocent people such as the victims of My Lai in Vietnam and the Palestinian genocide. 

High school, college and the university system are designed with anti-intellectualism at the center. Intelligent and intellectually gifted students are made fun of and stigmatized as being nerds. Experimentation with alcohol, smoking, vaping, tobacco, drugs, multiple sex partners and breaking laws is encouraged, beginning in high school, and serve to keep students from poor, working class, lower middle class and now middle class backgrounds from realizing their potential so that students from upper middle class and rich elite backgrounds have a relatively easier and straightforward path to Ivy League Universities and high-paying jobs.

In my high school class, there were 221 students. Only one student made it to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and no student made it to an Ivy League university. A1, the straight A student from my A.P. United States History class, had the dream of becoming a pediatric oncologist. Our class voted A1 as most likely to become a doctor.  

I was upgraded to Chemistry Honors as a Sophomore (tenth grade), which is a class for Juniors and Seniors. My Chemistry teacher, Mr. Hodges, shared a grim statistic that most straight A and top 10 percentile graduating students fail their courses in college because they do not know how to study and because they have learned to get good grades without really studying or knowing the material. Mr. Hodges’s words were true for A1, she did not become a pediatric oncologist because the requisite college courses were too difficult for her and her grades were too low to become a candidate for medical school.

A2, another straight A student from my A.P. United States History class, was the daughter of a well-known local veterinarian. Her college plans were to attend University of Washington and pursue architecture. I once met A2 at the IMA (University of Washington’s premier gym) and could hardly recognize her with all of her make up as she used to dress conservatively in high school and did not wear much make up. I asked her about how her architecture degree was going and she told me that she had given that up and was now working as a sorority leader in a sorority.

I went to St. Augustine, Florida to attend a medical conference and met Mark (Dr. Mark, as I liked to call him). Mark and his wife had gone to Brown University and both had progressive views and believed in social justice. Before going to medical school in Israel, Mark was a tutor for high school students. Many of Mark’s students belonged to very rich and elite families. In order to serve society better, Mark also volunteered as a tutor for underprivileged students.

Mark told me that one of his students, who was from an elite family, wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania like his two older siblings did, but his grades were low. The family was able to guarantee the admission of all three of their academically mediocre children by donating $300,000 to the University, $100,000 for each of their children.

This $100,000 donation made them “friends of the University” and it gave them a position in one of the University’s many committees. Once they gained the committee position, they became “deep friends of the University” and this deep friendship guaranteed one seat for their child in University of Pennsylvania. They made three $100,000 donations and gained three University committee positions, thus guaranteeing that all of their children are accepted to University of Pennsylvania. This is how elites send their children to Ivy League Universities.  

Mark told me that he volunteered, tutored and mentored a brilliant student from an underprivileged background. She grew up in a single family household and her mom worked three jobs to support the family. Mark told me of his pride and happiness at her academic achievements and her high SAT and ACT scores. She applied to the University of Pennsylvania as that was her dream school. Mark said that in all of his tutoring experience, she was the most qualified and deserving candidate for University of Pennsylvania.

When University acceptance letters came, the student from the elite family was so happy to tell Mark that he had been accepted to University of Pennsylvania. The student from the underprivileged family waited for Mark to open the letter from University of Pennsylvania admissions together. She was not accepted and it broke her heart. Mark told me that it was the first time he felt helplessness at the injustice and inequality in American higher education. Mark felt shame and anger while the student wept on his shoulder.

If America wants to stop its decline, injustice within the education system must stop. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, have potential and it is society’s job to ensure that students realize their potential. America must stop its corrupt elite from using arrogance, ignorance and anti-intellectualism to set up the majority of its students for failure and start helping them succeed. With discipline, guidance, support and mentoring, all students can achieve their dreams and America can become great again.