US Dislike of Merit Leads to Incompetence.

Is the Pandemic to Blame for the Decline in American IQ?

It’s easy to blame the pandemic for everything, but here’s one thing we can’t pin on it: the decline in American IQ. According to a recent study, IQs have been dropping since 2006, with the most significant effect seen in those aged 18 to 22. This is a startling reversal of the “Flynn effect,” which saw average IQs rising for decades.

The study found that core skills like verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and mathematical reasoning have all declined. The authors suggest that the quality of education is the most likely culprit, with changes in content and test-taking skills being the cause.

The Caliber of Education Has Decreased

It’s no secret that the quality of education has decreased in recent years. School systems have eliminated honors classes and advanced placement courses, while gifted education has been under attack. Mathematics curricula focused on finding correct answers to problems have been branded as furthering white supremacy, and watered-down alternatives have been adopted instead.

History has also been under attack, with eighth graders’ knowledge of basic history declining since 2014. Grades have been rising, while SAT scores have been falling. This is not because kids today are wowing teachers with their stellar performance. Average SAT scores have fallen from 1026 to 1002 on a 1600-point scale over the same period.

A Disjunction Between Grades and Test Results

More and more schools, especially in poor minority neighborhoods, show a marked discrepancy between passing student grades and state proficiency test failures in the same subjects.

It’s time to take a hard look at the state of education in America and make changes that will benefit our students and our future.

Grade Inflation and the Dumbing Down of Education

For example, in New York City, even before the pandemic began, in the largely black and Hispanic Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, 94 percent of students in grades six through eight passed their math classes, but only 2 percent of those students passed state math exams testing their grade-level proficiency. In largely Hispanic Washington Heights, 100 percent of kids passed English language arts, but only 7 percent of those kids passed the corresponding state test. In still other schools in California, failing grades have simply been eliminated and replaced by C’s.

The educational bureaucracy’s “solution” to such glaring problems has been to lower the standards. Thus, what counts as “basic proficiency” in core subjects like math and English has been gutted. Entire towns, like Schenectady, New York, have been unable to get even a single eighth grader to meet the proficiency mark under the old standard.

In what is often crowned the nation’s top high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, after considerations of race were infused into the formerly race-blind admissions process, teachers predictably saw the “lowest scores we’ve ever seen” (averages in the low 70s) on trigonometry exams, even though they had lowered standards and made the tests “substantially easier” to accommodate dumber students.

Many schools have also stopped assigning class rank to students (and have stopped recognizing extraordinary achievement by crowning valedictorians) — with class rank being another measure that would reveal the true pecking order of students that inflated grades conceal.

Standardized testing requirements for entry into universities have been eliminated, with over 80 percent of four-year colleges not requiring such testing this year. The “pandemic” excuse universities have offered for the move rings hollow, as prominent universities such as Columbia have led the charge to make the change permanent.

The true motivation, we can guess, is the widespread expectation that the Supreme Court will soon bring an end to affirmative action. The expected change has prompted race-obsessed universities to admit less-qualified individuals by eliminating objective metrics such as testing, thereby making the whole admissions process so discretionary and opaque that it will be impossible to peer behind the curtain.

With dumber students coming to college, rampant grade inflation has taken over universities as well. Only 15 percent of college grades were A’s in the early 1960s, while today that percentage is 45 percent. Even at purportedly elite universities, such as Harvard, the median grade is an A-, and the most common grade is an A.

To further accommodate increasingly brittle students, a growing number of universities have moved away from assigning grades for student work. Such creeping grade inflation and grade elimination have driven a steady, across-the-board rise in college graduation rates.

University curricula have likewise been under attack. Works of great literature that challenge stale ideas and open complacent minds, serving as Kafka’s “ice ax for the frozen sea inside us,” have been de-canonized and replaced by third-rate productions of the identity grievance industry. Requirements to learn classical languages — Greek and Latin — have been dropped from prestigious university classics departments supposedly devoted to the study of the classical literature of Greece and Rome.

The Dumbing Down of Education

Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but it seems that the standards are being lowered to accommodate dumber students. In New York City, for example, passing grades are given out like candy, but state exams show that only a small percentage of students are actually proficient in core subjects like math and English. The solution to this problem has been to lower the standards, which has resulted in rampant grade inflation and a steady rise in college graduation rates.

Universities have eliminated standardized testing requirements for entry, and many have stopped assigning class rank to students. The true motivation behind these changes seems to be the expectation that affirmative action will soon come to an end, prompting race-obsessed universities to admit less-qualified individuals by eliminating objective metrics such as testing.

With dumber students coming to college, universities have lowered their standards and made tests easier to accommodate them. Grade inflation has taken over universities, with even elite universities like Harvard giving out mostly A’s. To further accommodate increasingly brittle students, a growing number of universities have moved away from assigning grades for student work.

University curricula have likewise been under attack, with works of great literature being replaced by third-rate productions of the identity grievance industry. Requirements to learn classical languages have been dropped from prestigious university classics departments.

It’s time to stop the dumbing down of education and start holding students to higher standards. Only then can we truly achieve equality in education.

Lowering Standards in Education Will Lead to a Crisis of Competence

As charges of “systemic racism” continue to be leveled, more and more medical schools have begun eliminating the MCAT exam that used to be a universal requirement for admission. Similarly, the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, concerned about inadequate diversity in the profession, recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal to eliminate the LSAT exam aspiring attorneys must take as a gateway to law school admission.

As educational standards at schools, universities, and professional schools crater, it only makes sense that those lower standards would be pushed further down the line and find their way into the professional world. Measures such as lowering bar exam cutoffs for admission to the practice of law or turning the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam from a graded test into a pass-fail test must be implemented because too many aspirants to these prestigious professions, especially from minority backgrounds, will otherwise be unable to compete.

If anyone imagines that it will be possible to keep these steadily creeping markers of dumbness, ignorance, and incompetence to educational institutions and out of the workplace, they are dreaming.

A Crisis of Competence

What we should expect in the coming years is a widespread crisis of competence afflicting every nook and cranny of American life. Expect to encounter doctors who do not know fundamental human biology, lawyers who lack the capacity to reason, and bankers, engineers, and rocket scientists who cannot do basic math and rely increasingly on “smart” AI to do their work for them.

And that means more crashes of every sort, whether financial crashes, ecological crashes, plane crashes, or crashes among poorly engineered self-driving cars, which lead to injuries that medical malpractice then turns into crashes of our delicate biological systems.

The Importance of Competition

The great 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt diagnosed the “agon,” the competitive struggle for excellence in every walk of life, as the highest value in classical Greece. Such universal competition created a fiery crucible within which every species of excellence could be refined and cultivated.

Education was no exception to this rule. Subjects such as gymnastics, music, and poetry were taught through healthy competition. The ordinarily negative feeling of envy was channeled to drive individual achievement and the greater collective good until envy gave way to reverence and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake. As Nietzsche summarized it, “Every talent must develop by fighting.”

This vision of education in ancient Greek society may appear quite foreign to us now, but the example remains instructive precisely because we have strayed very far in the opposite direction. We are frightened of competition, of pitting students against one another and seeing who will emerge victorious. We are more comfortable awarding participation trophies than trophies acknowledging extraordinary achievement, which we reflexively brand “racist.”

Excellence and Success Cannot Be Bought

Excellence and success cannot be bought through giveaways and reality-denying decrees. We can eliminate failing grades, but we cannot eliminate failure. When our economies, our bodies, and our engines begin to sputter, our mounting bill will come due.

The invoice will bear the following description: rather than forcing individual and collective excellence to emerge as the natural outgrowths of a culture that incentivizes and exhorts us to overcome every species of adversity and rise to greatness, we tried to skip to the punchline. We hoped to use the blunt instrument of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion to engineer a racially proportionate outcome we did not earn and do not deserve. As a result, we got exactly what we did deserve — failure and incompetence at every level.

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