New in PJ Media:
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but after years of being told that boys who think they’re girls and girls who think they’re boys are “brave” and “courageous” instead of mentally ill, and that the Founding Fathers were all racist white supremacist slave owners who did nothing good in the world, and that figuring out one’s pronouns is much more important than learning algebra or calculus, America’s teens are registering lower IQs than they have in nearly a century. It has long been obvious but now it has been proven: the woke indoctrination that passes for education in America today is making our young people stupid.
Campus Reform reported Wednesday that it isn’t just a young people’s problem: “a recent study suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, Americans’ average intelligence quotient (IQ) is declining.” However, the study, which was published in the May-June 2023 issue of Intelligence, finds that young people are experiencing the most significant decline in intellectual abilities: “the greatest differences in annual scores were observed for 18- to 22-year-olds.” What a surprise.
The study notes a phenomenon that philosopher and intelligence researcher James Flynn, who died in 2020, first noted: “starting in 1932, average IQ scores increased roughly three to five points per decade. In other words, ‘younger generations are expected to have higher IQ scores than the previous cohort.’” However, after a generation and more of Leftist dominance of the education industry, there is now “a reverse Flynn effect.” The study shows that between 2006 and 2018, there were general declines in IQ scores. Campus Reform adds that “overall declines held true across age groups after controlling for educational attainment and gender, but the study shows that the loss in cognitive abilities is steeper for younger participants.”
Why might this be happening? Campus Reform states laconically, “The professors who authored the study theorize that the quality of education could play a role in reversing the IQ gains enjoyed by previous generations.” No kidding, really? You mean forsaking teaching children critical thinking skills and instead filling their heads with Leftist slogans and societal contagions makes a difference? Spending class time on teaching the Left’s current sexual obsessions instead of readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic actually turns out students who are more concerned about proclaiming that they’re “queer” or “trans” than about acquiring the skills they need to make a decent living? Wow! Who could have seen that coming?
There is more. Read the rest here.
SKA says
During my last three years of teaching college from 2014-2017 the incoming high school graduates were products of the Common Core bowdlerization of public school education. Apart from the few exceptional learners I found the newest cohorts of incoming freshmen to be less intellectually curious, to have less critical thinking skills, and to have a less ambitious work ethic. What can you make of Common Core American literature guidelines that ignore Mark Twain and Lee Harper?
gravenimage says
Thanks for that grim view on the ground.
Michał Moś says
I also watch young people. I admit that I am from Europe, from Poland specifically. And I have the impression that this problem concerns not only America, but also us. It’s all the fault of automation and computerization. The fault is that computers do a lot for us, sometimes too much, and this means that when it comes to, for example, doing something manually, a young man spreads his hands, panics and runs away. We have too easy access to information that is not necessarily useful, not necessarily moralizing, not practical … Well, this makes young people dumber. I will say more. I’ll go back to what I said earlier. Today’s generation of teenagers is dumber than we were when we were teenagers. If anyone asks, I’m almost 40 and I see it. There are those who cannot read a paper map or find books in the library. They are simply accustomed to the fact that everything, every piece of information is available at the click of a mouse on the computer. They absorb everything like a sponge, which is not always advisable or not very good. Added to this is hopelessly poor contact with family, with parents… I once knew a boy who… didn’t know whether he was taking a notebook for mathematics or chemistry. And that was 20 years ago in Poland. Fear of what will happen next.
Mark Spahn says
“I once knew a boy who… didn’t know whether he was taking a notebook for mathematics or chemistry.”
What does it mean to “take” a notebook?
Hank says
@Michał Moś
“…every piece of information is available at the click of a mouse on the computer”
Not to mention the mobile phone. The generation 18-22 grew up in a world where everyone has their nose on the cellphone and flipping page after page with no end in sight. They don’t have human-to-human contact and hardly converse directly with another human being. They do it through the cell phone.
The latest trend today is that you don’t even have to talk, converse or have a human friend through the phone anymore. Its now a robot that sounds, reasons and behaves just like a real live human being. The young people coming up only have a robot friend to interact with. May God help us.
Hank says
https://www.makeuseof.com/online-ai-chat-companions/
somehistory says
People rely on the internet for information. A lot of what is on the internet is just wrong, incorrect, and those mistakes/errors are compounded by the copy/paste functions on computers.
News items are rife with misspelled words and confusing sentences because words which should be included, are left out.
A preschool has instructed the parents to not praise the students their own kids, for their accomplishments, nor tell the little girls they are pretty.
Schools and preschools are indoctrinating the kids to be totally confused about everything.
So-called “educators,” are telling kids that the doctor who delivered them on their day of birth was **wrong** and that their parents are wrong and the kids are not the gender they truly are.
I saw a headline….couldn’t stomach the reading of it…where a person in her 30’s is going through her “change of life,” and the doctors didn’t know because she’s young and ‘non-binary.”
If they won’t trust the doctor who delivered them to know whether they are little boy or little girl, why would they trust a doctor to help them through any medical issue? And they don’t….they just complain about bad dx’s and not getting any help.
When they were passing out brains, these people thought they said trains and ordered a locomotive.
Like pop beads, hula-hoops, poodle skirts, ducktail haircuts, and peanuts in coca-cola, this stupidity will go someday, and those who took blockers, had unnecessary and mutilating surgeries, will be lining up to sue those who did the dirty deeds…and probably the parents who ‘didn’t protect” them.
deze MN bee says
Dummies will dumb down any technology. But that’s just them. Other people can wait at a bustop and watch Patrick Susskind explain Quantum Mechanics. What was that? Let me rewind. He also disses other Physicists which is fun. Yeah, you know that guy Woit up at Columbia…yeesh… And Smolin, a mid-level prof?
No, it’s not the phone. In fact Steve Jobs’ iPhone will be ranked with James Watt’s improved steam engine for a similar reason: a phenomenal power to bring the vast world to the individual. This modern plague, Covid, made me toy with an idea: what if a virus evolved in Nature that smoothed out the brain
and nobody noticed until it was too late. No doctors. People were too dumb for Med School. Hey Jonno what was that plank’s constant that people 200 years ago got so f*****g excited about? Nah, Flickhead, you mean like Toopid over there, “thick as two planks”. Yeah, right Jonno, I think I’ve heard that one. Yeah I’m sure you have Flickhead, I’m sure you have. But Jonno what if there was only one plank? Well obviously Flickhead, Toopid over there would only be half as toopid. Yeah Jonno I see that, you’re so smart you could be Prez of the Useless States of Merika. Yeah I’m working on it Flickhead, am working on it.
deze MN bee says
Leonard Susskind. Ironic, but it were small hours where I am. Even the dogs in the street have shut up. Patrick Susskind wrote Perfume -better read than the movie seen.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
This is true that a lot of what’s on the internet is plain wrong. However, all the companies that were thought/supposed to curate information on the internet simply go by doctrine, be it on climate change, vaccines, jihad, et al. In the meantime, none of those advisories are there for people who claim that there are more than 2 genders. Or that sex is something different from gender (other than in English grammar, where sex refers to various reproductive organs and gender refers to linguistic sex-related attributes (although it gets weird in some languages when inanimate objects get assigned male or female, and not talking about electronic connectors and sockets here)
On top of that, w/ the bulk of MSM looking like English versions of the Soviet era TASS and Pravda, it’s no wonder that people go to the internet to look for news. I don’t see that ever changing
I remember when Liberals used to goad people to ‘trust the science’, even though it’s at best indeterminate when it comes to meteorology, but is pretty precise when it comes to Biology. Yet those same people who tell us that the earth is heating up also tend to believe that one can choose whether to be male or female, and better still, such processes are reversible.
Westman says
As Carl Sagan said in his series, “Cosmos”, it’s not how much we read that is important to our understanding, we can only read a limited amount in our lifetime, it is WHAT we read.
Frankly, young people are reading more, on line, than my generation, without computers, did from printed materials. They can read, very well, when it comes to the latest fashion, what game is popular, and how the Kardashians are faring. However, they have a limited vocabulary that revolves around social interactions.
Vocabulary is a large portion of IQ tests so it isn’t surprising that the new batch of young people have lower average IQ scores while having an affinity for devising absurd pronouns.
These young folk are not really dumber – their memories are filled with useless, rarely evaluated, drivel that is only half-benefit useful in the real world of competitiveness. Who you know is important and WHAT you know, transferable to skill, is far more important.
Mo says
NO WAY! What a shock!
Gee, what else do we expect? These lunatics don’t even know if they are boys or girls – something that every generation on earth, up until just a few years ago, figured out at least the basic idea by the time they were potty trained.
I have zero patience for it or for them. Zero.
Keys says
This is another reason why the voting age
must be raised.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Maybe, but what will you raise it to? 40?
Siddi Nasrani says
We don’t want you to think for yourselves, let us do the thinking for you, saves you the trouble, just repeat
ad infinitum what we tell you & vote for us every time.
gravenimage says
America’s Teens Are Dumber Than They’ve Been In 100 Years
………………………………
So depressing–but really, who can be surprised?
Burnaby Lad says
we’re dumber
࿗Infidel࿘ says
This is a hotly contested Olympic event b/w the various White English speaking coutnries, mainly the ‘Five Eyes’