A recent finding from the annual Reagan National Defense Survey paints an ominous picture: In 2018, 70% of respondents said that had “a great deal of trust and confidence” in the U.S. military. Today, that number is 46%.

That’s a stunning drop, no?

And why might that be? Part of it no doubt derives from our commander-in-chief. Joe Biden is no Donald Trump nor Ronald Reagan, and we’d venture that his presence at the terminal end of the chain of command doesn’t inspire young Patriots toward military service.

But neither does our educational system inspire young Americans to serve. How could it, when our kids are being indoctrinated to see their country as deeply flawed rather than profoundly decent?

“In our education system today,” says 101st Airborne Army veteran and former New England Patriot Jake Bequette, “so few young people are hearing real history. They’re hearing our American heroes being represented as evil racists … who were doing all these terrible things to disadvantaged people. And that really is shaping the views of America’s youth and making them have less respect for our institutions, have less respect for our history, and therefore making them less liable to want to put their lives potentially on the line to serve in our country’s military.”

It’s pretty simple, really: We defend what we value and cherish. But we ignore or abandon that to which we’re indifferent. And more and more young Americans are being indoctrinated toward indifference.

Take University of Minnesota liberal arts professor Melanie Yazzie, for example. As The Washington Times reports, she embodies “the intellectual malfeasance being foisted on the next generation of America’s leaders at your tax-supported schools, colleges and universities.”

As Yazzie puts it: “We’re all indigenous people who come from nations who are under occupation by the United States government. It’s our responsibility as people within the United States … to decolonize this place. … [America] is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed. We want the U.S. out of everywhere.”

“The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States for the freedom and the future of all life on this planet,” Yazzie added. We “need to lean into the fact that colonizers are scared. Lean into scaring them and making them feel uncomfortable!”

Ask yourself: If you’re a young person being fed a steady stream of this sort of rubbish, how likely are you to deem your country worth defending?

Of course, the indoctrination doesn’t begin in college. Grade schoolers are being fed a steady diet of it, especially in our Democrat-run inner cities. As Tina Descovich, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, put it: “We are in a crisis in America in public education. We have the lowest test scores since the 1980s in reading and the lowest math scores ever. Yet we have organizations like Black Lives Matter that are setting aside a whole, entire week, the first week of February, to drive their ideology, [an ideology] that [is] divisive and [seeks] to destroy our culture and our country.”

Ashish Vazirani, the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, recently told the House Armed Services Committee that our military had missed its 2023 recruiting goals by 41,000. Regarding the young people now of prime age for military service, Vazirani also said this: “Members of Generation Z have low trust in institutions and are decreasingly following traditional life and career paths.”

Low trust in institutions, eh? Where on earth might that lack of trust be coming from? From a woke curriculum in our institution of education, perhaps?

Of course, wokeness doesn’t stop at the water’s edge of education; under Joe Biden, it has infected not only our service branches and our military leadership but also its once-vaunted service academies. Not even our special operators are immune from the pernicious influence of wokeism.

“Wokeness in the military,” argues former Army Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr, “also affects relations between the military and society at large. It acts as a disincentive for many young Americans in terms of enlistment. And it undermines wholehearted support for the military by a significant portion of the American public at a time when it is needed the most.”

If we want to address our recruiting shortfall, we had better stop trashing the institutions we’re asking our young people to defend.