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?
The study shows that this intellectual decline was somewhat mitigated among those who went to college, but not among young people. The study notes that “exposure to education may only be protective for certain age groups.” This could be, it continues, because of “a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills.” The authors of the study report that “scores were lower for more recent participants across all levels of education.” They add that “this might suggest that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study’s sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills.”
Yes. Even just ten years ago, many colleges still offered some semblance of an actual education. But as curricula nationwide have grown increasingly woke, students come out of our nation’s colleges and universities best suited to become Antifa thugs, and only poorly and spottily equipped to do any actual work.
Campus Reform points out that “millennials–the main age group completing their K-12 and college education during the study–have experienced vast changes in the education system. These include students learning to read from an influential but defective curriculum and students receiving inflated grades from their professors.” Of course. Can’t have the poor dears suffering from low self-esteem.
Related: Is It Time to Abandon Public Schools?
And so our educational system has turned out a generation of coddled, cosseted narcissists who have never been intellectually challenged and are abjectly ill-equipped to deal with such challenges when they come. They don’t know how to think and have no ability to deal with anyone who offers them a point of view that differs from their own. They have, however, been taught that only “racists” and “white supremacists” and the like have perspectives that differ from their own in the first place, and that such people deserve to have no voice at all. “Hate speech,” they’ve been taught, is not free speech, and that’s what people who disagree with them are spreading.
In this way, the groundwork has been laid for an authoritarian state in which dissenting points of view are forcibly silenced. The nation’s youths have been thoroughly indoctrinated to welcome such a state.
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