Tag: dumbing down

The Death of Reading

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century. Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet. 

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

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Woke activists push for ‘Black English’ to be taught in Democrat state’s preschools to combat ‘harmful language hierarchies’

California activists are calling for the state’s preschools to legitimize the use of Black English in the classroom.

Supporters say teaching the dialect, also known as African American English (AAE) or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), will help ‘combat harmful language hierarchies.’

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education group is part of a movement advocating for Black English to be recognized as a legitimate, rule-based language in preschool classrooms on par with other languages.

Co-founder Dr Ashley Williams told PBS the movement is personal because she grew up being told by her family that the way she spoke at home wasn’t acceptable at school.

Williams says she felt ashamed and embarrassed by this and is spearheading the movement because she doesn’t want her two-year-old son to grow up with the same experience. 

‘I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it in one way or the other,’ she told the outlet. 

The advocacy group – known as BlackECE – has trained educators to support Black English speakers in the same way they support dual language learners. 

The group uses resources like the Black English Knowledge Brief and webinar series, which helps educators, caregivers, and school leaders better understand Black English, its roots.

It also offers ways to create classrooms that affirm children’s language and identity.  

It comes after the Golden State introduced a plan in 2020 to expand early dual-language learning and support bilingual children.

BlackECE argues that Black English should also be included as part of the scheme.

‘We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,’ Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said.

‘We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.’

According to 2020 research published by the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of US children and 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are bilingual. 

As of 2023, 96 percent of Black Americans speak English fluently.

Around 88 percent speak only English, with the remaining respondents using another language at home and speaking English very well, according to Pew Research.

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College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.

The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.

The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.

It seems there are numerous compounding explanations for these test results: pandemic-era learning gaps leading to lower levels of preparation, declining college enrollment forcing schools to lower admissions standards, and lower levels of public funding for education, to name a few.

The results also coincide with the explosion of large language models like ChatGPT, which by many accounts have carved out a new floor for academic failure in both K-12 and college-level education.

While there’s no denying how complicated the issue is, there is evidence that removing technology from classrooms altogether could offer an immediate boost.

In one classroom in Minneapolis, for example, a literature and English teacher banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done on pencil and paper. As the school-year started in September, just 46 percent of the students involved said they felt confident about their reading skills. A few months later in February, that number stood at 95 percent.

Though it’s just one classroom, something is clearly off the rails in the education systems of the richest countries of the world — and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more students will be pushed into the world with the reading skills of 4th graders.

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The Biggest Problem With AI Today

What’s the biggest problem in AI today? Is it cost, with token budgets being blown out of the water by agentic AI? Is it sustainability, with AI consuming electricity and fresh water? Is it ethics, with tech companies cramming AI into everything?

I think it’s deeper than that. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper-rooted problem: nobody’s making decisions.

Or more correctly, we’ve abdicated far too much of our executive function to AI. We’ve surrendered our thinking. 

Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Where This Issue Came From

On Friday afternoon, I was mulling over what I wanted to cover in this week’s issue. It’s a holiday weekend here in the USA, so not as many folks will be reading, and that’s okay. (I appreciate that YOU are) And I’ve covered a ton recently:

So on a whim, I set up a NotebookLM with the last 180 days of conversations from over 40 different subreddits, like r/marketing, r/chatgpt, etc. – everything around marketing, business, and AI. I connected it to Claude Code with the NotebookLM command line tool (the most token—efficient way for Claude to talk to NotebookLM), and then put all of my 2026 newsletters year to date into an input folder.

I asked Claude to compare what I’ve written about thus far this year with what folks are finding their hardest problems are with AI. Claude spit out a list of 10 major things derived from over 800,000 words of foaming at the mouth on Reddit that it thought might be good newsletter topics:

  • AI Visibility challenges
  • Agentic oversight is degrading
  • AI deployment is broken
  • 40-60% of company budget is wasted on the wrong models
  • AI is a rental
  • AI sycophancy is screwing up synthetic focus groups
  • AI detectors don’t work
  • AI is hollowing out corporations and no one’s hiring junior staff
  • People measure AI by tokenmaxxing
  • Marketers are basically unpaid labor for AI companies training data

Claude was REALLY pushing for me to write about how measurement is broken in marketing and AI today, and I might do that at some point, but that’s not what I see when I look at this laundry list. Yes, there are measurement issues in many of them, data issues in many of them, but… measurement being broken is the symptom of what I said earlier – we’ve abdicated executive function.

For those who aren’t analytics nerds, you know that measurement is a trailing indicator. It’s not a leading indicator.

Part 2: Executive Function Recap

As a reminder, I bucket executive function into four categories that I call PODS:

  • Plan: you think about achieving something in the future and make a plan to get there from here
  • Organize: you take what you have and try to make sense of it
  • Decide: you take what you have and make decisions about it
  • Solve: you solve the problems you have

Yes, there is more nuance to executive function than this, but this handy, short list is an easy way to see what our brains are doing. That’s critical thinking, one of the worst-named practices we have.

Why? Because critical thinking isn’t about being critical, per se. It’s about metacognition – the definition of which is thinking about thinking. When you’re thinking about how you think, you open the door to improvements, to growth.

Thinking about thinking means asking questions and reflecting – is this the best way to do something? How could I do this better? How could I derive more enjoyment from this thing I’m doing? It’s not criticizing yourself as much as it is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it’s working or not.

When you’re planning, organizing, deciding, and solving, you’re inherently thinking about thinking. Every time you plan, every time you bring order to chaos, you have to check in with your own brain to see if what you’re doing is moving you closer to the goal posts.

Executive function is one of the things that defines our sentience as living creatures. Every sentient creature from a mouse to us does these tasks. You’ve read or heard stories about crows fashioning tools from wire to solve problems, you’ve watched dogs and cats make decisions and plan. I’ve watched my own cat measure optically whether or not she can make a particular jump.

Properly prompted, today’s AI tools are superb at executive functions as well. Given the right frameworks, harnesses, and data, they can plan, organize, decide, and solve better than we can at most language-based tasks.

And therein lies the actual problem.

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Six California Cities Ranked Among Top 10 Least Educated In US

Six California cities ranked among the top 10 least educated metropolitan areas in the United States, according to a report by WalletHub published on June 29.

Looking at the 150 most populated metro areas, the city of Visalia ranked as the second least educated, while Bakersfield was fourth, and Modesto, Fresno, Stockton, and Salinas followed.

All six are in central California.

The other four metros that rounded out the top ten were all in Texas – McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Brownsville-Harlingen, Beaumont-Port Arthur, and El Paso, at first, third, ninth, and tenth least educated, respectively.

“Higher education doesn’t guarantee better financial opportunities in the future, but it certainly correlates with it,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in the report.

“The most educated cities provide good learning opportunities from childhood all the way through the graduate level.”

As Dylan Morgan reports for The Epoch Times, to determine the ranking, WalletHub equally factored in the share of adults at least 25 years old who have a high school diploma or higher, who have at least some college experience, who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and who have a graduate or professional degree.

Visalia ranked last among the 150 metros in percent of bachelor’s degree holders and percent of graduate or professional degree holders.

It ranked 107th highest in median annual household income, and there appeared to be a general correlation between income and education rates across the nation.

However, Visalia still had a lower poverty rate than the state average—11.3 percent compared to 11.8 percent, according to U.S. Census data—and Stockton ranked as having the 31st highest median household income while Salinas ranked as 26th highest, though those two cities were near the bottom in education.

Education and income rate correlations may not reflect California’s higher cost of living and regional economic structures, such as the Central Valley’s reliance on agriculture, an industry that has not historically required higher education the same way other California hubs have, such as Silicon Valley.

The San Jose metro, home to Silicon Valley, ranked as the fourth most educated in the United States.

WalletHub said that more than 55 percent of the San Jose metro’s population over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while nearly 28 percent have an advanced degree. .

It also ranked third for university quality. San Jose is near Stanford University and has Santa Clara University and San Jose State University in the center of the metro.

The nearby San Francisco metro area, which is home to the University of California—Berkeley, ranked as the eighth most educated.

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One-Third Of Americans Can Barely Read, But They Can Still Vote

As Americans gear up for our country’s 250th Independence Day, a shamefully small percentage of the rising generation truly understands what we’re celebrating. On the latest Nation’s Report Card, only 22 percent of eighth graders had a proficient understanding of civics. A measly 14 percent were proficient in U.S. history.

This cohort, which was tested as eighth graders in 2022, graduated from high school this year. In practice, this means that emerging adults are woefully unprepared to take on the responsibilities of citizenship.

Most of this cohort is now eligible to serve on juries; less than half knew that the Bill of Rights guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Almost all of them will be eligible to vote in this year’s midterm elections, yet only 34 percent knew the functions of the three branches of government. All of them will participate in civic life, whether as neighbors, citizens, taxpayers, parents, or perhaps all of those things. This makes it all the more concerning that 31 percent could not identify why freedom of expression is important for a healthy society.

Ten generations ago, a group of patriots – most of whom were young adults – laid the groundwork for the greatest country the world has ever known. They did a lot of writing, winning the war for public opinion through Common Sense and The Federalist Papers. There was no public school system at the time, but there was a public that was willing and eager to read these texts, which most young people cannot understand today.

Now, not only are the public schools failing to deliver a history and civics education, they are also failing to teach the reading skills students would need to educate themselves on these topics.

Thanks to decades of under-education, 28 percent of American adults rated at or below the lowest level of literacy on an international assessment. That number is likely to worsen over time. Long-term trend results released by the National Assessments Governing Board last month show that 42 percent of 13-year-olds cannot summarize main ideas of long passages, identify paraphrases of what they’ve read, or connect related ideas in longer texts.

Without these skills, they stand little chance of being able to understand or appreciate the genius of the founders in their own words. It is sad yet unsurprising that American pride has declined along with the quality of our education system. According to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 34 percent of young adults say they are proud to be an American. American pride increases by age group, topping out at 66 percent among Americans 65 and older.

A resurgence of patriotism will require the rising generation, and every generation after it, to read and understand our founding documents and their philosophical underpinnings that have propelled this country through a quarter millennium of innovation. This cannot happen without radical honesty about the dismal state of American education.

Right now, there is a culture of silence around the true status of our schools. According to Gallup, “nine in 10 parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math.” It’s hard to blame them for this erroneous belief, given that “roughly eight in 10 students in the U.S. receive mostly B’s or better.”

America’s public schools are sites of educational malpractice, covered up by educational fraud. No one in the public school ecosystem has the incentive to be honest about what a student can and cannot do.

Governors don’t want to preside over falling graduation rates, which would naturally result from raising the standards needed to earn a diploma. Teachers don’t want to deal with parents angry that their kids are bringing home bad grades. Administrators don’t want to deal with teachers frustrated by angry students and parents. As a result, schools cover their own poor performance with good grades, which ultimately lead to diplomas that no longer signify readiness for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

The only adults in this equation with an incentive to ensure the children are educated are their parents – the same parents who are being lied to, en masse, by public school employees for their own convenience.

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Outrageous: Rice University Offers Course on Taylor Swift Analyzing “Whiteness” and “Nationalism”

In the latest in waste of money on courses at American schools according to Campus Reform, “Rice University, a private research university in Houston, Texas, is offering multiple courses centered on pop star Taylor Swift, including one class examining far-left themes such as “American nationalism and whiteness” through Swift’s lyrics and public image.”

“Rice will offer “COLL 118 Mastermind: The Taylor Swift Eras” this fall, in which students will analyze Swift’s albums as “primary texts” and examine “how a single artist can shape global culture and shift industry standards.”

If you find this absurd you are not alone. Yet again the universities are offering woke courses lacking academic rigor.

The class is focused on Swifts musical trends genres as well as her ownership dispute over her master recordings.

If this wasn’t irrelevant enough “Rice is also listing a second Swift-focused course in its 2026-27 catalog titled “COLL 167 Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift.” This seminar course will focus on Swift’s songwriting alongside discussions about “femininity and gender,” “politics and social impact,” and “American nationalism and whiteness.”

University courses wouldn’t be complete without an attack on traditional gender roles and “Whiteness.”

“Students in the class will examine all 10 of Swift’s albums and complete written responses, participate in classroom discussions, and write a final essay analyzing one of her songs.”

In other words no academic rigor and waste of time.

“While it is listed in the 2026-27 course catalog, Rice has not specified whether the “Miss Americana” course will be offered during the fall or spring semester. The university previously offered the same course in fall 2023.”

The fact that this is being offered in Texas shows wokeness has infultrated schools in almost every region and state.

“The university’s undergraduate tuition cost for the 2026-27 academic year exceeds $70,000. The university estimates the total cost of attendance to be $97,000 after fees, housing, meals, books, and personal expenses are included.”

This is insulting to those paying tuition at these schools.

The cost of tuition is getting higher while the courses become more anti American and less academic.

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Public Schools Are In A Downward Spiral

After decades of steady growth, attendance in U.S. K-12 public schools has shifted drastically. Over the past five years, registration has fallen by 2.3 percent, or 1.18 million students, and schools show no signs of rebounding. Lower birth rates are the primary driver of the downturn. The number of births has decreased steadily in recent years, with 690,000 fewer children born in 2024 than in 2007.

California lost nearly 75,000 K-12 students as of the 2025-26 school year, a slide more than twice as steep as the previous year.

Since 2017-2018, the Golden State has seen a 10 percent decline.

New York City has also been hard hit.

As of the 2025–26 school year, 793,300 students are enrolled in K-12 schools, down nearly 10 percent from 2020.

The loss of enrolled students has prompted some desperate measures. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is offering “free” childcare for 2-year-olds regardless of their parents’ income. In 2024, parents of toddlers spent an average of more than $23,000 on center-based childcare, according to the NYC Comptroller.

For those still attending public schools, chronic absence—the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of a school year—is a growing problem. As of January 20, the latest data show that chronic absenteeism, which surged from 15 percent pre-COVID to 28 percent in 2022, remains elevated at 24 percent.

Nat Malkus, American Enterprise Institute’s director of education policy, notes that the surge in absenteeism affects districts of all sizes, racial backgrounds, and income levels. However, the data reveal significant racial and ethnic disparities, with 39 percent of black students, 36 percent of Hispanic students, 24 percent of white students, and 15 percent of Asian students chronically absent.

A major factor behind rising absenteeism is that many students lack motivation to attend school. In 2024, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students ages 12 to 18 and found that only 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school feel motivated to attend. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. Similarly, a 2024 EdChoice poll found that 64 percent of teens said school is boring, and 30 percent view it as a waste of time.

Additionally, a 2024 survey revealed that nearly 64 percent of school parents say K-12 education is headed in the wrong direction, up 8 points from 2023.

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Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She’s calling it a “call to action.”

She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place.

For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel,” and threatened the possibility of safety strikes.

Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures.

Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions.

So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood.

The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s.

Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo.

In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she “…led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible.” That’s a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did.

Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were “… things we really didn’t get right,” including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn’t accountability. It was a pivot.

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South Carolina Passes “GRADE FLOOR” Ban For K-12 Public Schools

In a move to protect educational excellence, consistency and standards, the State of Carolina has become the first state in the U.S. to ban “grade floor” policies in K-12 public schools.

For those who are not familiar with the “grade floor” policy, it is a practice that prevents teachers from giving a student a grade below the actual percentage the student earned.

The most common “floor” school systems adopt is the 50% minimum. Basically, a student need not do any work to earn at least a 50%. It’s part of what is called “equity grading” which should be correctly called “enabling grading” because it enables students to appoint themselves as “victims” in order to skate by without achieving educational proficiency in school. It teaches students that they can’t and don’t have to achieve, especially when they face difficult content or situations. We have published several articles on this crippling policy:

Currently, we can confirm only six districts in Maryland that have used or do use the 50% floor in grading, Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Talbot. Talbot recently removed it from their policies.

Currently, it is estimated that 18 out of South Carolina’s 22 School Districts use the 50% floor in student grading even though research concludes that the practice does not improve student achievement.

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