In 2011, Scotland destroyed its secondary school curriculum, once ranked among the best in the world. It was not the first country to do so.

Between 1990 and 2010, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and England — among many others — radically reformed their school curricula to emphasize general skills over content knowledge. In Scotland and France, the reforms were orchestrated by left-wing progressives committed to social equity; in England and Sweden, by free-market devotees as a means to enhance economically valuable skills. In Germany and Japan, the impetus was simply to update the school curricula for modern economic conditions. All of the reforms had the same logic: Remove facts, content, and structure, and replace them with general analysis and synthesis tasks.

These reformers discarded the traditions their predecessors had built over the previous century. Children in Scotland, France, and Sweden no longer study a humanities curriculum resembling that of their parents or grandparents; nor do they necessarily study anything resembling the curriculum of their peers in neighboring schools. Any sense of a collective tradition, going forward or backwards, unifying a country or a people, has vanished.