Should have stopped the leaded gas sooner. NYTs today. “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

[https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html)

Without those “millions of Americans, screwing millions of tiny screws into millions of iPhones” there is no employment for these people. They are NPC, sleepwalking through life. See that lots now, just people, staring into space, it’s like their brains are somewhere else. What do we do with them? Leaded gasoline wiped millions of IQ points from us, neurotoxins (RoundUp, etc) in everything, did us in. We need those China sweatshop jobs, there is no other work for these millions of Americans. They are not working at Google.

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Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime

You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.

The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.

Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.

Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute emphasizes that among children in the fourth and eighth grades, the declines are not the same across the board. Scores for children at the top of the distribution are not falling. It’s the scores of children toward the bottom that are collapsing. The achievement gap between the top and bottom scorers is bigger in America than in any other nation with similar data.

There are some obvious contributing factors for this general decline. Covid hurt test scores. America abandoned No Child Left Behind, which put a lot of emphasis on testing and reducing the achievement gap. But these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.

My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.

This value is based on the idea that life is filled with hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money. Your best friend comes up to you and says, “My husband has been cheating on me. Should I divorce him?” To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, calculate probabilities.

To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book “Stolen Focus,” “The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.

Every 3rd person on the street, every person on Reddit!

Teachers today are instructed not to chastise or punish children who refuse to do homework etc. It was not like this when I was a child.

The Departments of Education have a lot to answer for.

Couldn’t possibly be the mass amounts of aerosolized aluminum among many other elements from climate engineering/geoengineering/solar radiation management/stratospeheric aerosol injection/cloud albedo enchancement/marine cloud brightening, now could it? Listen to D@ne W1g1ngton’s weekly global alert news reports on his YouTube channel if you want to learn more.