Lacking in Critical Analysis
Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a
Lifetime
By David Brooks, New York Times, April 10, 2025
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.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of
Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy
and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores
in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.
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.”
This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability,
the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a
complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote,
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and
you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad
enough to sustain you.”
Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute emphasizes
that among children in the fourth and eighth grades, the declines are not the
same across the board. Scores for children at the top of the distribution are
not falling. It’s the scores of children toward the bottom that are collapsing.
The achievement gap between the top and bottom scorers is bigger in America
than in any other nation with similar data.
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.
My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to
cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that
used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard
to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life.
That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.
This value is based on the idea that life is filled with
hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money. Your
best friend comes up to you and says, “My husband has been cheating on me.
Should I divorce him?” To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what
is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other
minds, calculate probabilities.
To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by
reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book “Stolen Focus,” “The
world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be
thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another
person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the
discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a
compelling point of view.
Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of
this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for
their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer
attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Once you start using your mind, you find that learning isn’t merely
calisthenics for your ability to render judgment; it’s intrinsically fun.
But today one gets the sense that a lot of people are
disengaging from the whole idea of mental effort and mental training.
Absenteeism rates soared during the pandemic and have remained high since. If
American parents truly valued education would 26 percent of students have been
chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year?
In 1984, according to the National Center for Education
Statistics, 35 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. By 2023,
that number was down to 14 percent. The media is now rife with essays by
college professors lamenting the decline in their students’ abilities. The
Chronicle of Higher Education told the story of Anya Galli Robertson, who
teaches sociology at the University of Dayton. She gives similar lectures,
assigns the same books and gives the same tests that she always has. Years ago,
students could handle it; now they are floundering.
Last year The Atlantic published an essay by Rose Horowitch
titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” One professor
recalled the lively classroom discussions of books like “Crime and Punishment.”
Now the students say they can’t handle that kind of reading load.
The philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote in The Walrus:
“I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared
intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few
semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be
entirely generated by A.I. — papers that show no sign the student has listened
to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading or even briefly entertained a
single concept from the course.”
Older people have always complained about “kids these days,”
but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or
render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s
tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I
supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid
as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument
in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on
its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified.
Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an
inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the
approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent
plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the
moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it
is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades
of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture,
then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a
screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.
