FILE – The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File) Everything modern civilization has built rests on two modest skills: Reading and arithmetic. America spent two centuries showing what they make possible. It is now showing what their absence does.
The news from American classrooms is, for lack of a better word, depressing. Reading and math scores have been declining for more than a decade. Some of the fall predated the pandemic, which made matters considerably worse. The latest chapter in the story is the strangest, and perhaps the most disturbing. Professors report freshmen who cannot read basic sentences, let alone finish books. They struggle to follow arguments from beginning to end, as though every paragraph should arrive with a skip button.
The usual suspects line up for blame. Smartphones capture attention before the day even starts. Social platforms tuned to drip-feed dopamine and keep users hooked. Academic standards lowered until failure itself becomes increasingly rare. Grades inflated until everyone graduates feeling truly exceptional. All of it matters, but none of it gets to the heart of the problem.
That’s because the problem in the classroom is civilizational. For most of the last century, IQ scores rose across the rich nations. Each generation outscored the one before. Researchers called it the Flynn effect, after the man who clocked it. Better food, more schooling, smaller families, and greater mental stimulation all contributed to the cumulative gains. The brain had a tailwind, but that tailwind has turned. Studies in the U.S. and beyond now show scores dropping among the young. For a century, the line went up. Now it goes down.
Into this slump walks the machine that thinks for you.
AI will counsel you on your marriage. It will summarize your meeting, plan your week, and draft your eulogy in a few minutes. It’s useful, but it’s also very dangerous. A muscle you stop using wastes away, and the mind obeys the same rule. Hand your reasoning to a chatbot every minute of every waking hour, and its capacity slowly atrophies. Researchers call it cognitive outsourcing, a rather sterile term that describes renting out the one organ you cannot replace.
The real danger isn’t that machines are getting smarter, although they clearly are. Rather, it is that people appear less willing to think for themselves, even in the smallest matters. Every convenience carries a cost. A calculator weakens numerical instinct. GPS weakens navigation. An AI that writes, summarizes, explains, and decides can weaken judgment itself.
A population that cannot understand a contract will sign away rights it never meant to surrender. Citizens who cannot run the numbers will accept whatever figures they are handed. People who cannot analyze a claim become vulnerable to anyone selling certainty (and now, with AI, anything). Self-government assumes voters capable of reasoning from premise to conclusion. Remove that ability, and democracy becomes little more than a guessing game with ballots.
Civilization is a relay race. Each generation grabs the baton of hard-won wisdom and carries it a little farther. The race works because knowledge is not merely inherited, but practiced, tested, and passed on. Who hands on the baton once runners forget how to run?
A society can coast on borrowed competence for a while, maybe a generation. Then a crisis lands. The power grid fails. The markets seize. The software breaks. The instructions are missing. Everyone discovers at the same moment that convenience and understanding were never the same thing.
America turns 250 very soon. The Founders built the republic on the radical assumption that ordinary citizens could be trusted to think. Thomas Jefferson championed public education because he believed a literate population was the best defense against would-be tyrants. But the bet came with conditions. Self-government only works if the public has the capacity for it. It lasts only as long as each generation can still read the fine print, do the math, and recognize deception when it appears.
This is the worry as the candles are placed on the cake, and a president who doesn’t read leans in to blow them out. A nation can survive bad leaders, worse scandals, lost wars, even a stupid decade or two. But it cannot survive, and certainly not thrive, in a society where citizens leave college decorated with credentials but lacking the competency once expected of middle schoolers.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
Add as preferred source on Google Tags American Classrooms Chatbot/AI smartphones The Flynn Effect Thomas JeffersonCopyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Comments: Link copiedMore Opinions - Education News
See All
Opinions - Education Juneteenth is a time to celebrate the success of HBCUs by A. Scott Bolden, opinion contributor 2 days ago Opinions - Education / 2 days ago 
