Everything modern civilization has built rests on two modest skills: Reading and arithmetic. America spent two centuries showing what they make possible. It is now showing what their absence does.
The news from American classrooms is, for lack of a better word, depressing. Reading and math scores have been declining for more than a decade. Some of the fall predated the pandemic, which made matters considerably worse. The latest chapter in the story is the strangest, and perhaps the most disturbing. Professors report freshmen who cannot read basic sentences, let alone finish books. They struggle to follow arguments from beginning to end, as though every paragraph should arrive with a skip button.
The usual suspects line up for blame. Smartphones capture attention before the day even starts. Social platforms tuned to drip-feed dopamine and keep users hooked. Academic standards lowered until failure itself becomes increasingly rare. Grades inflated until everyone graduates feeling truly exceptional. All of it matters, but none of it gets to the heart of the problem.
That’s because the problem in the classroom is civilizational. For most of the last century, IQ scores rose across the rich nations. Each generation outscored the one before. Researchers called it the Flynn effect, after the man who clocked it. Better food, more schooling, smaller families, and greater mental stimulation all contributed to the cumulative gains. The brain had a tailwind, but that tailwind has turned. Studies in the U.S. and beyond now show scores dropping among the young. For a century, the line went up. Now it goes down.
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