Tag: dumbing down

The Dumbest Year by Far (Until the Next One)

Merry Christmas and all that. We’ve just a few days left in what has been by far the dumbest year on record. Don’t worry—the next one will be even dumber, and 2028 is going to reach forbidding heights of stupidity for which none of us are adequately prepared. Enjoy this while it lasts.

Come, friends and haters. Join us on a journey through time and space. Take a moment to reflect on some of the dumbest (and not so dumb) moments of 2025, most of which you’ve probably forgotten by now.

JANUARY — Corpse Removed from White House

• Sleepy Joe Biden was finally evicted from his taxpayer-funded care facility. Kamala Harris was also forced to leave, but not before humiliating herself one last time by pledging allegiance to “the United States of the United States of America” and certifying her own defeat, to joyous applause from members of Congress. Jeff Bezos’s wife-to-be, Lauren Sánchez, flaunted her tits at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

• Former senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), a.k.a. “Bullion Bob,” was sentenced to 11 years in prison following his conviction on corruption charges. His daughter continues to host a show on MSNBC.

• As wildfires ravaged California, ABC News anchor David Muir leapt at the chance to show off his chiseled bod on national television. In one of the most egregious acts of journalistic narcissism, Muir used a clothespin to achieve a form-fitting silhouette on his network-branded safety jacket while reporting live from the smoldering wreckage.

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Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom Destroys Actual Intelligence In Students

Ialways assumed that before AI destroyed our humanity, we’d at least put up a fight. No, I’m not talking about AI gaining consciousness and physically enslaving us (though I’m certainly not ruling that out as a possibility) — but it is alarming how quick many are to accept AI usage not just in their daily lives, but in education.

As an educator, I’ve heard high school teachers and college professors alike defend teaching AI usage in the classroom: “The technology isn’t going away, so kids have to learn how to use it responsibly.” “AI can be a useful tool.” “Learning how to write the right prompts is a marketable skill.” They say we should not only allow but encourage students to use AI to brainstorm ideas, write outlines, and provide feedback on their work.

On the surface, these suggestions can seem benign. Our society is pushing the idea that AI usage is not only inevitable but good. “You’re a writer,” a silky tone on an advertisement for AI software sings, “even if you are the kind who relies on AI.” Okay, so that’s not the exact verbiage, but that’s the idea we’re being sold. We’re reassured that AI can simply be a legitimate “tool.” You are a writer even if you use an AI generator. You are an artist just by instructing prompts. You are a creator, although it’s the algorithms doing the creating.

If the goal is simply to produce outcomes, one could argue that AI usage should not just be tolerated but encouraged. But education shouldn’t be about producing outcomes – whether it be a sparkling essay or a gripping short story – but shaping souls. The purpose of writing isn’t to instruct a prompt or even to produce a quality paper. The purpose is to become a strong thinker and someone who enriches the lives of everyone, no matter their profession. 

Each and every step of the struggle it takes to write is essential. Yes, it can all be arduous and time-consuming. As a writer, I get how hard it is and how tempting it might be to take shortcuts. But doing so is cheating oneself out of growth and intellectual payoff. Outsourcing parts of the process to algorithms and machines is outsourcing the rewards of doing one’s own thinking. Organizing ideas, refining word choices, thinking about tone are all skills that many citizens in this nation lack, and it’s often apparent in our chaotic, senseless public discourse. These are not steps to be skipped over with a “tool,” but rather things people benefit from learning if they value reason. Strong writing is strong thinking.

But these thoughts aren’t just my own opinions. A recent MIT study shows that AI usage decreases cognitive function like critical thinking. Seems rather odd to insist that something proven to weaken our brains should be introduced to places where institutions of learning, isn’t it?

Many argue that in order to thrive in today’s job market, young people need to master the skill of “writing prompts.” The assumption is that it’s a great skill to learn how to tell a robot to do a job for you; a skill so great, in fact, that we need to send kids to school for it.  For decades, educators have argued kids need screen time to prepare them for today’s job market. They acted as if using the internet were a skill that needs years of training when in reality three-year-olds naturally become experts. Let us first focus on developing the minds of the youth — something best done without AI assistance — and then let them use those skills in the workplace as needed. Students should aspire to be more than mere “prompt writers,” but minds capable of thinking, reasoning, and perseverance.

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NYC teachers discover teens can’t read clocks after school cellphone ban

Time got away from them!

New York City teachers have found that scores of teenagers can’t read traditional clocks after a cellphone ban in schools statewide — because students figured the skill would be useless in the digital era, according to a report.

“The constant refrain is ‘Miss, what time is it?’” said Madi Mornhinweg, who teaches high school English in Manhattan.

“It’s a source of frustration because everyone wants to know how many minutes are left in class,” she told Gothamist. “It finally got to the point where I started saying, ‘Where’s the big hand and where’s the little hand?’”

Many tech-minded teens have no clue what time it is during the course of the school day because classrooms generally only have analog clocks on the walls, teachers told the outlet.

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Judge rules against UCLA prof suspended after refusing lenient grading for black students

A judge has issued a tentative decision against a professor who sued UCLA after he was suspended in the wake of the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter riots after refusing a request to grade black students leniently.

Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford’s recent ruling against UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein sides with UCLA on all three causes of action: breach of contract, false light, and negligent interference with prospective earnings. 

Klein’s legal team has filed an appeal, and Judge Ford is scheduled to consider that request, or enter a decision finalizing his tentative ruling, at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 9. 

If the judge does not amend his tentative ruling, Klein will receive nothing in a case in which he sought a $13 million dollar award, alleging the university and a former UCLA business school dean destroyed his lucrative expert witness practice when it publicly suspended him. 

“It’s a bloodbath against Klein. It rewards him nothing,” said documentarian Rob Montz in a documentary on the controversy he published last week first reporting on Ford’s Dec. 1 ruling titled “When a Professor Took His Cancellation to Trial.”

“No punitive damages, no compensatory damages,” Montz said. “Gordon doesn’t get a dollar.”

Klein, who has now taught at UCLA for about 45 years, argued in his lawsuit he averaged about $1 million annually as an expert witness in many high-profile corporate cases. 

But he argued his suspension meant he would have to disclose that administrative punishment, hurting his credibility with jurors and effectively making him undesirable as an expert witness. 

Ford, in his 30-page ruling, agrees UCLA had the contractual right to place Klein on administrative leave while it investigated the massive controversy surrounding Klein’s email to a student rejecting his request to grade black students leniently and the viral uproar it created. 

“UCLA had the right to determine what public response was necessary to address and mitigate the immediate [and] extraordinary public outrage toward both Klein and UCLA arising from the public disclosure of Klein’s email,” Ford wrote.

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Germany: Over 1,100 teachers sign explosive letter stating many schoolchildren cannot tie their shoes or use toilet paper anymore

More than 1,000 teachers in the German state of Hesse have called for comprehensive changes in an incendiary letter, which has been delivered to the state’s Ministry of Culture. In the letter, they state that many elementary school children are not able to complete simple tasks such as tying their shoes or use toilet paper.

“Keeping order, recognizing and adhering to rules, using the toilet independently,“ are all listed as tasks students cannot do in the new resolution, which includes using toilet paper themselves.

Students can also no longer “cut, glue, sit (upright), or tie their shoes,“ the report reads, which was reported widely in the German media, including Welt.

Citing the letter, Junge Freiheit also reports that “independent personal hygiene is not always a given – colleagues even reported students who did not know how to use toilet paper.”

The letter also states that the children feature serious attention deficits, with the teachers writing: “Many children are no longer able to listen or follow instructions for long periods of time.”

The damning letter comes at a time when Hesse is experiencing unprecedented mass immigration, including into its school system. Already in 2022, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration reported that an estimated 50 percent of all children under the age of 6 were foreigners or had a foreign background. In the last three years since the report, many of these children have entered the elementary school system.

Teachers also report in the letter that they need to spend an enormous amount of time teaching children simple skills, many that were once taken for granted.

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UC-San Diego Report Indicates Shocking Number of Students Entering College in California Lack 8th Grade Math Skills

A new report from the University of California San Diego indicates that a shocking number of students entering the University of California system lack the math skills one would expect from a middle school student.

Some of this can be blamed on school closures during Covid, but not all of it. At the end of the day, this is a failure of the schools and teachers that failed to impart these basic skills.

It’s also an excellent reminder that not everyone needs to go to college. If you can’t do high school level math, why should you even be considered?

Newsweek reported:

Students at California University Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets

A sharp rise in students entering the University of California system without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators.

A new internal report from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years.

Why It Matters

In 2020, just 6 percent of first-year students at UCSD placed below Algebra 1. By 2025, that number had surged to 18 percent, according to the UCSD Senate Admissions Working Group (SAWG) report.

The findings reflect a growing disconnect between high school transcripts and actual college readiness. The SAWG report links the increase to pandemic-era learning disruptions, long-standing inequities in California’s K–12 system, and the elimination of standardized testing requirements in UC admissions.

What To Know

The number of UCSD students requiring Math 2, a course originally designed for less than 1 percent of the incoming class, surged from under 100 students annually to over 900 by fall 2024.

This example of an easy question failed by many students is just stunning.

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One in FIVE students entering UC San Diego can’t write properly, new data reveals

Roughly one in five Americans entering UC San Diego cannot write at an entry level standard, a new report revealed. 

About 20 percent of incoming students to the California university had to be placed in analytical writing courses after failing to meet the requirements of a writing placement exam, which forced them into specialized courses called ‘AWP’.

The report published by a UC San Diego admissions committee added that writing skills and literacy are in decline across the entire US. 

According to the university’s faculty, freshmen students’ vocabulary was ‘increasingly’ limiting their ability to engage with longer and harder texts. 

As a whole, the school had seen a ‘steep decline in the academic preparation’ of its domestic freshmen students.

The November 6 report read: ‘Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.’

One possible solution offered was ‘moving beyond GPA and course titles’ in high school to evaluate how ready students actually are for writing at a college level.

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Alaska Schools’ Social Studies Standards Omit Washington, Lincoln, And Christianity 

Alaska’s new social studies standards don’t mention the Nome Gold Rush. They don’t mention the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. They don’t mention William Egan, the state of Alaska’s first governor, and they don’t mention Sarah Palin, who ran for Vice President of the United States. There’s a lot more that’s missing in the Alaska social studies standards, but you can tell right away that something is wrong when Alaska’s social studies standards leave Alaska’s children ignorant of the headlines of Alaska’s history and the most famous Alaskans.

Education departments in every state are on radical autopilot when they make social studies standards. Americans expect blue states to use their state social studies standards to impose identity politics ideology and action civics (vocational training in progressive activism) on schools and students, strip out factual content, and ignore or slander the history of Western civilization and America, and call it “social studies instruction” — that’s what you get in states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. But radical activists embedded in state education departments do the same thing in red states whenever policymakers and citizens aren’t looking. That’s what just happened in Alaska.

The Alaska Social Studies Standards (2024), produced by Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development, avoided the worst of the blue-state social studies standards’ extreme politicization, unprofessional vocabulary, and ideologically extreme content. That’s because there’s hardly any historical content. The standards’ absences include basic facts of American history, much of how our government works, and our foundational documents of liberty. The standards also introduced substantial new amounts of politicized material.

How did Alaska’s Department get its curriculum so badly wrong?

The department outsourced much of the standards to the radical activists who have captured the national social studies establishment. Alaska’s standards take their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from its College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The C3 Framework replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque “inquiry”; lards social studies with identity politics ideologies such as Critical Race Theory; and inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.

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Big Tech is paying millions to train teachers on AI, in a push to bring chatbots into classrooms

On a scorching hot Saturday in San Antonio, dozens of teachers traded a day off for a glimpse of the future. The topic of the day’s workshop: enhancing instruction with artificial intelligence.

After marveling as AI graded classwork instantly and turned lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, one high school English teacher raised a concern that was on the minds of many: “Are we going to be replaced with AI?”

That remains to be seen. But for the nation’s 4 million teachers to stay relevant and help students use the technology wisely, teachers unions have forged an unlikely partnership with the world’s largest technology companies. The two groups don’t always see eye to eye but say they share a common goal: training the future workforce of America.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. In exchange, the tech companies have an opportunity to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said skepticism guided her negotiations, but the tech industry has something schools lack: deep pockets.

“There is no one else who is helping us with this. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” Weingarten said. “We went to them — they didn’t come to us.”

Weingarten first met with Microsoft CEO Brad Smith in 2023 to discuss a partnership. She later reached out to OpenAI to pursue an “agnostic” approach that means any company’s AI tools could be used in a training session.

Under the arrangement announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000.

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Why a Student With a 1590 SAT Score Was Rejected by 16 Colleges

Stanley Zhong did everything right. A 4.42 weighted GPA (3.98 unweighted). A 1590 SAT score (1600 is perfect). He’d even launched his own startup (RabbitSign).

Yet the 18-year-old Palo Alto-area graduate was stunned when he found himself rejected by 16 of the 18 schools he’d applied to, including multiple state schools.

“Some of the state schools, I really thought, you know, I had a good chance,” Zhong told ABC7 News. “I didn’t get in.”

Zhong’s story has begun to gather some media attention, which was the subject of discussion at a recent House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. Yet almost all of the stories failed to mention the likely reason Zhong was rejected: He’s Asian.

For years, colleges have been quietly discriminating against Asians in the admission process, admitting white, black, and Latino students with lower SAT scores and lower GPAs in the name of inclusivity. The problem for Asians is that, as a group, they tend to score really well.

This means there’s an abundance of highly qualified Asians applying to universities each year. This would not be a problem for Asian students if not for race-conscious universities, which, in recent years, have demonstrated a preference for social equity and racial balance over merit.

As a result, untold numbers of Asians have found themselves excluded from universities simply because of their race.

Harvard, which was sued in 2013 by Students for Fair Admissions for racial discrimination, is a high-profile example. Several years ago, the university released data showing that over an 18-year period (1995–2013), Asian American students outscored every other racial peer group, averaging an SAT section score of 767 (max 800). That is substantially higher than white people (745), Hispanic people (718), Native Americans (712), and black people (704).

In other words, Asian Americans had to outperform other racial peer groups to be admitted.

“[Asian Americans were] being held to a higher standard than [others], all else equal,” Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono wrote in a pretrial report.

The dirty secret was that Harvard, like most universities, was using racial discrimination to admit certain racial groups at the expense of others.

Many colleges and defenders of affirmative action, i.e., “positive discrimination,” refused to admit this was actually racial discrimination. Some supporters of the policy, however, had the intellectual honesty to do so.

“I can accept the trade-offs as the necessary cost of this policy,” Jonathan Chait wrote in a 2022 New York magazine article. “What I can’t accept is the refusal by Harvard and its defenders to admit what the policy is.”

Chait described their refusal as “gaslighting,” and the Supreme Court agreed. In a watershed 2023 decision, the court held that race-based admissions violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The high court was right, but we should look beyond the legal problems of affirmative action.

America is built on the idea that all people should be treated equally, but today, we’re divided on the question of whether racial discrimination should be used so long as it results in preferred outcomes. The vast majority of people (73%) oppose race-based admissions, but it’s a policy supported by many liberals—indeed, demanded.

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