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“ Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime”

Level5
in Off-Topic
Gifting this NY Times article by David Brooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-04.zd1u.Xh_s0TiILLJb&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Excerpts:
“ 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.”

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.”

“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.”

Level5: Do you even wonder, given these data, why our country is where it is now?

Comments

  • stillersstillers
    Oh, I thought this thread was about the buffoon's tariffs "achievement."

    A buddy of mine uses an alternate meaning for it, but he refers to us as a country of "liquid intelligence." Meaning, we do not routinely/consistently turn what we momentarily learn into wisdom, and instead allow what coulda been intelligence/wisdom flow right through us.

    “ You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason...."
    Yep. Best evidenced by the results of the 2016 and 2024 national elections.
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