Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin's new Commentary essay on America's improving social indicators is well worth your time. Wehner and Levin cite declines in crime rates, abortion rates, drug use, teenage births, and welfare rolls since 1993. Meanwhile, education scores are up:
Educational scores are up. Earlier this year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the nation's fourth- and eighth-graders continue to improve steadily in math, and that fourth-grade reading achievement is similarly on the rise. Other findings show both fourth- and twelfth-graders scoring significantly higher in the field of U.S. history. Black and Hispanic students are also making broad gains, though significant gaps with whites persist. The high-school dropout rate, under 10 percent, is at a 30-year low, and the mean SAT score was 8 points higher in 2005 than in 1993, the year Bennett published his Index.
There's a paradox, however. Even as many social pathologies decline, those afflicting the family persist:
Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970. In the life of any society, the place of the family is central. That fact alone makes these last statistics significant, and seriously complicates the picture of dramatic progress in other, related realms. Indeed, the two starkly divergent trends, taken side by side, should cause us to reconsider certain common assumptions concerning just how culture, behavior, family, and society interact, and how they change.
It is possible that the statistics Wehner and Levin interpret as signaling the decline of the family may mean something else entirely: the transformation of the nuclear family into something different, something unique to our emerging global liberal civilization.