Smoke, Mirrors, And The "Dumbing Down" Of American Students
- Fellow Editors
- Jul 10
- 13 min read
Updated: Jul 13
Anyone who has been in education for over the past two decades will tell you the truth.
We are dumbing down our students in the United States. If you don't believe it, you can look at the test scores nationally or in each state. Many will point to the pandemic as the cause, an excuse educators will gladly grab on to. While the pandemic caused serious problems with student learning, the causes are much deeper and more varied.
Test scores aren't the only measure of what education "experts" are doing to kids. Aside from spending valuable academic time teaching students gender ideology and racial/economic division, America's schools are secretly and silently lowering the academic standards for students AND altering content taught in school to make sure that today's students are ignorant about history, science, and math. Not only that, but they have also assured that students no longer are proficient in reading and writing.
That's a lot to unpack, especially if you are one of the former students of the education system who was subjected to what I call educational malpractice. I'm not calling you stupid, I'm telling you have been robbed of the education you should have gotten. That is unless you went to private school or were homeschooled.
I can hear the teacher's unions screeching in my ear as I write. "You just want to blame and demean teachers," they scream. No, I was a teacher. I think teachers are great people. Most of them really care about doing right by their students. But how can you be an effective teacher if you don't have the knowledge or skills YOU need? What if you have been indoctrinated into the social activist "definition" of your job? Or if your time is constantly being taken away by woke causes, disciplining students, or stupid administrative work?
You can't. Teachers were duped into thinking they had a great education AND that they would return the favor to others. Most of them have pure intentions of doing good. There is a segment of the bureaucracy that doesn't want them to be able to do that.
Let's begin with proof.
College Entrance Exams are being made less rigorous.
College entrance exams came about to "even the playing field" between schools where grades were inflated and schools where strict standards were upheld. They were a way for colleges and universities to accurately assess if a candidate for admission would succeed in their school. Were the tests perfect? No. There were students who didn't test well who went on to graduate with honors from college. There were students who scored very well on entrance exams who bombed in college. At any rate, they were the most objective manner to assess student success.
But now this is happening:
In her article above, Joanne Jacobs quotes college professors and test experts regarding how the SAT is making reading selections shorter for a generation of students. The difference in the reading selections is drastic as they go from "reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage," (Michael Torres, policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT))
From College Board:
Reading and Writing
1. The digital-suite assessments have a single Reading and Writing section instead of separate Reading and Writing and Language Tests. This shift serves to make English language arts/literacy assessment on the digital SAT Suite tests more efficient while also acknowledging the reciprocal, mutually reinforcing nature of reading and writing skills and knowledge.
2. The Reading and Writing section’s passages are significantly shorter and more numerous, giving students more, and more varied, opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do and to encounter information, ideas, and perspectives they find interesting and relevant. At the same time, these shorter passages maintain the level of rigor of longer reading passages with respect to text complexity and grounding in academic disciplines. (For more information on the rigor of Reading and Writing test passages, see section 5.3.1.)
3. A single (discrete) question is associated with each passage (or passage pair) instead of having several questions associated with a small number of longer passages, as was the case in the paper-and-pencil SAT Suite tests. (For information on how the switch to discrete questions benefits both students and the quality of the assessments, see section 2.2.5.
Did they actually say, "these shorter passages maintain the level of rigor of longer reading passages with respect to text complexity and grounding in academic disciplines"? I smell something burning, perhaps some pants being worn by a liar. In my entire life I have never seen a passage the length of a social media post that challenged me in content and/or text complexity.
Even worse, shorter passages eliminate most of the founding documents of the United States and other important historic documents. College Professors are noticing the change.
Rose Horowitch, November, 2024 (Excerpts below):
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
Whether you think that literature classes in college are useful or not, classic literature can be a window into history and philosophy. The classics can help students see beyond their own lives and learn to think critically. They also expose students to complex and rich language.
When the author states that the problem is how reading is being taught in middle and high school, that is an astute observation. In some classes students are being spoon fed any classic novels they might read by resorting to the SPARK NOTES versions. Parents also state that their high school children come home with graphic novels and watch movies about literature instead of reading.
It's more likely that the classes are being assigned to read low level literature that is limited in its complexity but filled with junk values.
Some will say that it doesn't matter since we can look anything up online if we want to. There's a YouTube video somewhere or an AI bot that can tell a student what a literary selection means. That's the problem because literature is supposed to be open to many interpretations, not just one by a programmed intelligence. Alternatives are what helps students' thinking improve.
They will also tell you that today's students "can't relate to classic literature." Trust me, they can if you talk about the ideas in books as they relate to all of us. For example, who doesn't relate to the lovesick teenagers in Romeo and Juliet and the lesson their fate teaches warring families?Times Stronger Than Viagra! It Is Sold In Salisbury Pharmacy!
Or the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Does that description sound familiar? A student who read the Dickens Classic will be able to understand that history often repeats itself or that the state of the world is often a contradiction as it was in Dickens' time and is now.
Even more important is that not reading and understanding classics is taking away what E.D. Hirsch called the "cultural literacy" of our society:
“To be culturally literate,” says E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.” To be able to function in contemporary society, one must possess the background knowledge that literate writers and speakers assume their audiences already share. Those who know it are culturally literate; the opportunities of a free society are open to them. Schools need to impart a coherent core of knowledge in order to prepare students to thrive in the modern world.
Hirsch notes that “the idea of cultural literacy does not embrace the whole of education. This book ( Cultural Literacy) focuses sharply on the background knowledge necessary for functional literacy and effective national communication. This limited educational goal . . . needs special emphasis today” when teachers in American schools “are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”
As a starting point for defining what literate Americans know, the book includes a list of about 5,000 essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts, intended to illustrate the shared knowledge needed for effective communication. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know | Core Knowledge Foundation
Of course, progressives will tell you that cultural literacy omits different ethnic groups and nationalities. Not true.
It's Not Just Poor Teaching in Reading; It's Omission of Important Skills and Content
Reading is not the only problem. Let's consider handwriting. I remember when our county removed cursive handwriting from the elementary school curriculum. The reason was that some students struggled with fine motor coordination and a poor grade in handwriting would "hurt their self-esteem." Others stated that special education students would NEVER be able to learn cursive handwriting.
What these educators didn't consider is that cursive handwriting exists in all historic documents but that it actually helps students learn how to read.
From a 2025 article/study on ScienceDirect:
Handwriting and typing: Implications for letter learning
Most studies examining the relationship between handwriting and reading acquisition in childhood have focused on letter learning. A seminal study by Longcamp et al. (2005) involved a 3-week intervention with children aged 3 to 5 years, during which they learned 12 capital letters. Half of the children learned the letters through hand-copying, and the other half learned them by typing on a keyboard. In a posttest letter identification task, in which the children needed to select the target letter from four presented items (i.e., the target letter and three foils), those in the hand-copying training group showed a higher identification rate than those in the typing training group. Longcamp et al. (2005) suggested that hand-copying facilitates the construction of accurate letter representations because writing by hand involves movements that fully define the letter shapes, helping to build an internal model of the letter forms. This graphomotor hypothesis posits that the unique
correspondence between the perceived letter and the movement used to write it contributes to greater accuracy in learning to read and write through handwriting compared with typing. When children type, a cognitive map of the keyboard must be constructed. However, in this case, there is no specific relationship between the visual shape of the letter and the movement required to produce it, which hinders the construction of accurate mental representations of letters (Mangen & Velay, 2010).
By taking away the teaching of how to write and read cursive writing, the students who need to learn the most from the hand/eye connection are denied that skill. Yet, we were told that we had to get rid of cursive writing for those who didn't have the fine motor skills to perform it.
Seems like it's a small issue, but it isn't.
What about Writing?
While handwriting has been eliminated from schools, the skills that support the ability to WRITE an essay, a report, a letter to the editor have also declined drastically. In her essay from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Author Azadeh Aalai Ph.D. says:
It’s not just that students aren’t demonstrating critical thinking skills in their writing, basic competencies like proper syntax, spelling, and even proper structure like paragraph indentation and how to cite sources are being done very poorly.
By the way, so many colleges and universities stopped looking at the SAT writing section and do their own version of admissions essays.
Again, many of us in education saw this coming when we were first told not to worry about teaching grammar, proper syntax, proper usage of words and yes, spelling. Much like handwriting, we were sold a bill of goods that NONE of those skills would be worthwhile going forward and that teaching these subjects would "hurt a student's self-esteem." They told us that to teach proper English was somehow racist or exclusionary. However, without a common language and standards for understanding, we can never hope to communicate with each other. Maybe that's the point. Teaspoon On An Empty Stomach Burns 12 Lbs Of Fat A Week Safely!
For example, with the current misuse of the pronouns they, them, themselves, etc. it's hard to understand if a speaker is talking about one person, two people, or five hundred people. But, use the wrong singular pronoun in some states and you could be prosecuted for a hate crime. And does anyone truly understand all the "zee, zim" crap?
Some will say we don't need proper English since a computer would check and fix all the mistakes in our writing. Others are excited that AI could write for us.
As my teaching career progressed, I saw lower and lower writing standards being implemented. When I started teaching, asking an 8th grade student to write a research paper was normal. By the time I retired, I couldn't even demand that out of my high school seniors.
Of course, social media posts and texts are generally under 100 words and spelling, grammar, and syntax don't matter.
Let's not forget. Reading well and writing well go hand in hand. The more a student reads, the more examples of good writing he/she interacts with. The more vocabulary he/she learns.
AND THEN THERE'S MATH.
Finally, math skills have sharply declined in the last three decades.
Why? There are four possible causes. From Mathnasium.com: ( Note: Mathnasium is a national franchise that works with students on math skills.)
1.Insufficient Focus on Problem-Solving – Unlike top-performing countries like Singapore and Finland, the U.S. education system often emphasizes memorization over conceptual understanding.
2. Lack of Qualified Math Teachers – Many U.S. schools face a shortage of highly trained math educators, leading to inconsistencies in teaching quality.
3. Over-Reliance on Calculators & Technology – While technology is valuable, excessive reliance on calculators has weakened fundamental math skills in students. (Our note: students are allowed to use their calculators on the SAT's)
4. Math Anxiety & Negative Mindset – A significant number of students experience math anxiety, leading to lower confidence and disengagement from learning.
Educators say that Math was the content that suffered the most during the Pandemic and the distance learning implemented because of it. However, as we approach five years out from the pandemic, systems have done very little to nothing to solve the gap that occurred because of Covid. Instead of focusing on extra math instruction easily funded by the billions given to districts to fix problems which occurred during the pandemic, many school districts spent the money on initiatives totally unrelated to helping affected students boost their skills.
They spent the money on feel good, woke programs, salaries of middle and upper-level management, and even more ridiculous purchases such as ice cream trucks and football stadium rentals. Others never spent the money at all. An Empty Stomach Burns 12 Lbs Of Fat A Week Safely!
The end result is that math achievement is tanking. It's hard to learn when you are being taught about which of the 70 "different genders" you might be.
Our original premise is that we are effectively "dumbing down" our children in the United States. For years I have heard that this is being done purposely in order to have an easily controllable, gullible population that is totally dependent on government for every phase of life. After all, if one cannot read, reason, write nor do math, that person will be at the mercy of government support.
Sounds nefarious and evil, and it is. Do I buy into that theory? Not necessarily.
Instead, I think that our education system, like our government, has lost focus on the reason why it exists. It exists to teach children academics, content and skills. It is to provide our students with literacy. Period.
I'm reminded of the time in 2016 when Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said this about the military in a debate:
“The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. It’s not to transform the culture by trying out some ideas that some people think would make us a different country and more diverse. The purpose of it is that we protect every American." On An Empty Stomach Burns 12
At the time, the military under the Obama Administration was being changed into a social engineered jobs program. Recruitment was dropping and the effectiveness of our military was diminishing quickly.
While the comparison may be a bit extreme, the premise is correct. When a bureaucracy like the military or education loses focus on its main job, it becomes ineffective.
So now we have schools which are so busy promoting gender ideology, misguided activism, and social engineering that they have veered away from their mission. Instead of simply educating all students in academics and assuring that students have the skills to reach their potential, they have regressed them all to the mean, the middle, the mediocre and below. It is a way to make sure that none of them will be able to be truly independent.
And parents think that everything is fine as long as little Joanie or Johnny gets good grades. Many of them were taught in a similar, if not quite as bad, system.
So, what is to be done? Parents and community members need to know the content that is being taught in their local public schools. They need to talk to teachers, administrators and school boards and ask tough questions about the time spent on academics in our classrooms.
We need to help teachers claw back the teaching time for academics by insisting that ancillary, nonsense social engineering sessions are stopped. Technology such as laptops and tablets need to be used judiciously in lessons and only when appropriate. We need to wean our students off the idea that they can't succeed without them.
And, as the Supreme Court recently ruled, parents need to take the right to direct the education and upbringing of their children.
And, of course, there are always private schools, charter schools and homeschooling. They may be the only way to fight the smoke and mirrors of American education.
Jan Greenhawk, Author
July 10, 2025
Jan Greenhawk is a former teacher and school administrator for over thirty years. She has two grown children and lives with her husband in Maryland. She also spent over twenty-five years coaching/judging gymnastics and coaching women’s softball.
This article was originally featured on the Easton Gazette.
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