America is Getting Dumber
Nobody Cares Anymore
For a long time, I’ve been a Cassandra about schools and kids. I’ve written about declining interest in higher education, plummeting test scores, and the damage from closing schools during COVID. Since Cassandras are hated and ignored, I often tempered my conclusions and looked for some positive note to end my articles. But even the positive filter didn’t work. My concerns didn’t get much traction with the “serious people” for many reasons.
In journalism, the education beat is a training ground for kids from journalism school. Young journalists don’t have the experience to find the faults in the system or the clout to push their editors to run a negative story. Even if they did, they wouldn’t get the top headlines because the higher-ranking journalists and pundits focus on other topics, like the economy or elections.
Politicians don’t take schools seriously either. For years, I listened to the President’s State of the Union, waiting for one or two throwaway lines on schools. Again, schools aren’t going to get the applause and the votes.
Elites from any profession don’t really worry about education, because they all hit the education lottery. Their parents either sent them to a six-figure private school on the Upper West Side or bought a million-dollar house in Scarsdale. With private schools, tutors, and an Ivy League education, they think that all schools are awesome.
In certain circles, it is considered being supportive of public education — even if it truly sucks — is part of the orthodoxy. For years, any criticism of schools put you in the same camp as MAGA extremists, union busters, and Bud Light drinkers. Shudder.
Suddenly, pointing out the dis-education of American youth has become in vogue. It’s like the editors have unearthed a topic that nobody else has ever noticed before.
American Kids Can’t Do Math Anymore - The Atlantic
The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore: UC San Diego report shows students are not prepared for college, especially in math. — Megan McArdle, WaPo
The Stupiding of the American Mind — New York Magazine - From X:
“The world is dumber, and we all know it,” Lane Brown writes. It’s not just that children have been bombing their standardized tests or that more than a quarter of U.S. adults now read at the lowest proficiency level. It’s also that in nearly all aspects of life, we’re opting for routines, entertainment, and entire belief systems that ask less and less of our brains.”
Suburban Kids Are Getting Dumber, Too
Want some hard truths? Sure, kids in places like Baltimore and Newark are getting a suckier education than ever before; their parents stopped sending them to school during Covid, and absenteeism became the norm. Sadly, too many people accept that kids in cities will be poorly educated, but the truth is that kids in wealthy suburbs are also getting a shitty education.
A million-dollar home on a tree-lined block no longer means that your kids are leaving with the right skills to thrive in college. Suburban kids are getting dumber because parents don’t know what’s going on and because the meritocracy myth is dead. Schools are increasingly becoming empty shells for sports and extracurricular activities.
90 percent of parents think that their kids are doing great in school. Why? Because the schools hand out good grades like candy. Students have to work really hard to get a grade under a B. If you tell the average parent that their kid is doing okay, then the parent will give a thumbs up, answer emails from work, and book an appointment at the hair salon. They aren’t going to look for a problem if the school tells them that everything is groovy.
Then those kids go off to college, where they major in Beer Pong and Weed. The professors know that there are problems. Believe me, they gripe all the time about their ignorant students on social media, but then they pass them along, too, because the professors need good student evaluations for their tenure package. So, the problem of grade inflation continues into college, especially at colleges like Harvard, where nobody wants to upset the rich kids with the litigious daddies.
Some families are aware that their schools are middling. Those parents are often gunning for their kids to attend an Ivy League college, so they spend five figures on tutors. They spend $250 an hour for English tutors, physics tutors, calculus tutors, and SAT prep classes. Some families have all those tutors in their homes twice a week. They’ll spend another $10,000 on a college consultant. Basically, those kids are being entirely educated by private tutors; school is just a place for socialization and after-school sports. At some point, those families are going to walk away from public schools altogether.
But even with all those tutors, people don’t really care whether their kids are actually learning how to write and think for themselves. They don’t care whether their kids know the difference between Locke and Rousseau, Bronte and Austen. They want their kids to go to an Ivy League school, as they did, so they can get high-paying jobs. And they know that if their kids can’t jump over those hurdles, they can pull strings to get them those jobs anyway.
Nothing matters.
Schools don’t care either. Teachers know that their kids are strung out on technology. They know that the kids aren’t understanding material on their Chromebooks, and that textbooks actually worked better, but the school doesn’t want to pay for new textbooks, and whiny moms will complain about back pain from backpacks. They don’t want grief from the superintendent, who only cares about school rankings and appeasing the anti-tax senior citizens in town. Teachers know that the system is becoming a hollow sham, but can’t do anything to change things.
On Being a Cassandra
We have no role models. If our president is an idiot, why should any of us be smart? The Kardashians are idiots, and they’re billionaires with fake faces. People who work hard at regular jobs are depressed and feel poor even when making $100,000 per year.
Being smart is hard work. It involves reading books, overcoming failures, and avoiding excessive consumption of weed. None of that is fun. Our president and other rich people have figured out how to be rich and powerful without any of that heavy lifting. Education seems pointless.
When nothing matters, things fall apart. A dumber citizenry is never a good thing for democracies. If public education falters, then we will give up on smart, low-income kids. If meritocracy ends, then corruption and cronyism take over.
Education should be on the front page of the newspapers. All the Cassandras need to be heard.
LINKS
Why America’s Debate Over Which Children Are ‘Gifted’ Won’t Go Away: Gifted programs could be shutting out millions of high-performing Black and Latino children from low-income families. Can districts fix their advanced education problem?
The Autism Diagnosis Problem, The Daily — I have so much to say about this one.
I also have a lot to say about the Somali Autism Grift. Oh, I know how that happened.
Thanksgiving: I hope everyone had a great one. Here are some obligatory pictures of family and food. Overall, we had a great weekend. On Sunday, we spent most of the day in the car, driving Ian up to his college in Vermont and then back home to Jersey. Had a nice lunch in Vermont and listened to many podcasts.
Shopping: If you are going to buy something on Amazon, please use this link.
Watching: Slow Horses
Maybe this is not a fall from grace but a return to form.
I don't recall growing up that I was well-regarded by anybody BUT teachers and my own parents for being a heavy reader who retained most of the information I read. I don't recall that being knowledgeable and invested in being educated in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to actually be a requirement for financial or social success except in a narrow handful of professions.
Eggheads, intellectuals, scientists, brainiacs, nerds, etc. were treated with contempt and pity in most comfortably middle-class social settings. In most corporate workplaces, the guys getting the promotions were often not the smartest or most insightful or most knowledgeable but instead the affable glad-handers, yes-men, etc.
Meritocracy has always been something of a myth--a post-facto ideology cited by people who'd climbed the hierarchies to prettify their mediocrity.
In the early days, this is what the first wave of tech entrepreneurs exposed, up to the late 1990s or so--they recognized how recumbent and establishment-driven big companies like Xerox and IBM were, and most of them were impatient to just get on with it and make cool things and experiment with technology. A fair number of the early guys were like Wozniak--misfits who were scorned by the normal corporate world but who just kept doing "smart" things because they felt like it.
In this reading, Trumpism is the revenge of mediocrity against the brief ascension of a professionalized world that had higher demands and requirements for technical skills and intellectual creativity in the labor markets of the 1970s and 1980s, and the "normification" of nerdery. America is not getting dumber, it is just exalting being dumber, because that's how a fairly significant portion of the population has felt about education and knowledge all along.
That's one way to think about it. A more positive way might be to question whether the specific kind of meritocratic myth that was in ascension in the 1970s-1990s overvalued knowledge and intelligence by making it an imagined requirement across the board. Maybe affability is more important for most human endeavors, maybe emotional intelligence and political cunning are more productive. Maybe our sense of what education is for got sidelined by high-stakes mandatory testing, the particular requirements of STEM research, etc. and we lost a vaguer but more generative relationship between knowledge about life and communication and sociality obtained by reading literature, talking philosophy, studying religion, considering history, etc.
I care but my influence is limited. I enjoyed your slightly depressing article.