Dumbing Down American Children

We all want jobs to return to America. We want companies to build factories and even industries within our borders. And we are happy to see the government develop policies to encourage the move.

And yet, these noble sentiments ignore an obvious fact. Our educational system is not producing workers who can do the jobs. Thanks to the covid lockdowns and woke learning, America’s schoolchildren have been dumbed down, to the point of being incapable of doing tomorrow’s high tech jobs. And not ust high tech jobs.

Worse yet, while children from more affluent neighborhoods are now catching up, children from poor neighborhoods are still falling behind.

Newsmax has the story:

Given every two years to a sample of America's children, the National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of the U.S. school system. The most recent exam was administered in early 2024 in every state, testing fourth- and eighth-grade students on math and reading.

"The news is not good," said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. "We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic."

More specifically,

The average math score for eighth grade students was unchanged from 2022, while reading scores fell 2 points at both grade levels. One-third of eighth grade students scored below "basic" in reading, more than ever in the history of the assessment.

Pupils who are below basic level barely know how to read and write:

Students are considered below basic if they are missing fundamental skills. For example, eighth grade students who scored below basic in reading were typically unable to make a simple inference about a character's motivation after reading a short story, and some were unable to identify that the word "industrious" means "to be hard working."

The failures were mostly occurring at the lower end of the income spectrum:

Especially alarming to officials was the divide between higher- and lower-performing students, which has grown wider than ever. Students with the highest scores outperformed their peers from two years ago, making up some ground lost during the pandemic. But the lowest performers are scoring even lower, falling further behind.

It was most pronounced in eighth grade math: While the top 10% of students saw their scores increased by 3 points, the lowest 10% decreased by 6 points.

The obvious point needs to be restated, When the teachers’ unions force schools to shut down, affluent parents figured out ways to continue to educate their children. Poor parents, less so. 

Thus, an increasing wide gap in performance between rich and poor, engineered by people who rail against inequality.

The New York Post reports on the disparity:

The gap between high and lower performing students also showed signs of trouble by widening across most subjects in 2024 – with the best students doing better than those from 2022, and the worst scoring lower than those from 2022.

That gap was most starkly shown in eighth-grade math scores – where the top 10% of students saw a three-point increase, and the lowest ten saw a six-point decline.

We are going to arrive at a point where the only way to provide the human capital for the new factories and industries will be to import it from overseas. You do not think that it is an accident or an anomaly that the tech staffs of Silicon Valley high tech firms largely comes from China. 

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The Day the Country Died

 Within certain segments of the population the election of Donald Trump has produced various forms of mental agony. Certain groups of people are suffering mentally because they cannot accept that the nation rejected them, rejected what they stand for, and rejected an administration that represents their values.

Those who have pointed out that the Trump presidency has been good for the therapy business rarely point out that the crybaby left is contorting itself into agony because it is incapable of accepting that its great hero Joe Biden was a dud and that Kamala was a subliterate reformed courtesan. They ought to ask themselves how it happened that such an incompetent fool was the best they could find.

If you read through the Salon.com article about the mental health disaster that has befallen the crybaby caucus you will note that its members are in the latter stages of agony over what might happen under Trump. They are refusing to consider that the nation repudiated them because they had failed. The notion of failure does not appear in their mental space. 

This latter administration systematically lied about the mental fitness of the president. And yet, no one cared. No one understood that lying to the people does not make you a great leader. While whining in their herbal tea about the misinformation and disinformation that they see in the Trump administration, they fail to notice that the public rejected them because they were lying about the most salient fact-- the condition of Joe Biden’s brain.

So, the crybaby caucus is aghast at the way the Trump administration has turned back their great cause-- transgender rights. And it is horrified that so many fine lawless criminals are being deported. When Barack Obama did the same, they did not utter a peep.

They are bitterly mourning the loss of democracy, though they fail to recognize that the nation has repudiated them and embraced Trump-- democratically.

It’s not that they fear the loss of democracy. They fear the judgment of the people, especially when applied to their ability to govern. And they refuse to accept that the electorate has rejected their wondrous value system.

As you might guess, the writers at Salon do not care about accepting the results of a democratic election. They do not understand why the public turned against a political party that was offering them a new lease on sanity. The people voted for Trump because they are too stupid to understand the mental health stakes.

Many Americans, therefore, are reluctant or unable to consider how their experiences and personal challenges reflect larger dynamics and power relationships. They may instead internalize this stress and subsume the political into the personal in a manner that isolates them further, rather than bringing them together in a more healthy communitarian fashion with the goal of solving shared political and social problems.

But, Salon.com wants to lead us to more rational thought. It proposes that on November 5, the Democrats did not merely lose an election. Going all hyperbolic they insist that on that date the country died. No more and no less.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, the story of the week concerns something called DeepSeek. It is the latest in artificial intelligence, Chinese style. The Free Press explained on Monday:

A small Chinese AI lab has released DeepSeek R1, a large language model it produced on a shoestring budget. The results have stunned the tech world. “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” said Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The model outperforms OpenAI on a number of AI benchmarks—in spite of U.S. sanctions on the sale of advanced chips to Chinese companies.

As it happens, more than a few detractors have stepped forward to explain that the Chinese have been cheating and that they did not tell the truth about the program.

In the meantime, the NASDAQ tanked on Monday, so some people have not dismissed the Chinese effort… at least not yet.

Second, Norway imposed a wealth tax. The result was, wealthy individuals fled the country. Their net worth-- $54 billion. 

The result, lost tax revenues of: $594,000,000. The tax was supposed to bring in around $146,000,000.

The difference is not a rounding error.

Third, Aaron Sibarium reports from UCLA med school. 

UCLA medical school hired a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, In 2020. Since then, the number of students failing their shelf exams—standardized tests taken after each clinical rotation—has exploded, rising as much as tenfold in some subjects.

Now that the Trump administration is hard at work undoing DEI programs, the UCLA example tells us that it’s not a minute too soon.

Fourth, back in the land of socialized medicine-- that would be Canada-- outcomes are not exactly encouraging:

Today, SecondStreet.org released government data showing an additional 15,474 patients in Canada died in 2023-24 before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. However, that number is incomplete, as several governments provide either partial data, or simply do not track the problem.

SecondStreet.org collected the data by filing Freedom of Information (FOI) requests across Canada. When the data collected is extrapolated across jurisdictions which did not provide data, the number actually nearly doubles, to around 28,077. These figures cover everything from cancer treatment and heart operations to cataract surgery and MRI scans.

“Canadians pay really high taxes and yet our health care system is failing when compared to better-performing universal systems in Europe,” said Harrison Fleming, Legislative and Policy Director at SecondStreet.org. “Thousands of Canadians across the country find themselves on waitlists — in some cases for several years -— with too many tragically dying before ever getting treated, or even diagnosed.”

Fifth, we all thrill to the prospect of onshoring American manufacturing.  Would that it were that simple.

David Goldman explains in the Asia Times that we are still seriously dependant on foreign manufacturing:

But the big picture is that America’s foreign dependence is rising fast. Overall industrial output has been virtually unchanged during the past ten years, while imports of capital goods have nearly doubled. It will take more to re-shore American industry than hot air from an economics blog.

The important point is that, investments notwithstanding, we are not exactly flush with people who are capable of doing the jobs. Goldman remarks:

Yes, the United States shortly will produce more computer chips onshore, thanks to Taiwan’s TSMC, which built a plant in Arizona – staffed mainly by workers and technicians imported from Taiwan, because TSMC couldn’t find enough skilled labor in the United States. That’s the kind of success that makes failure seem attractive by comparison.

Sixth, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning so-called gender affirming care. Newsmax has the story:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday banning child gender transition care, which the order refers to as the "chemical and surgical mutilation" of children.

"Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions," the order reads. "This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation's history, and it must end.

"Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called 'transition' of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures," it states.

As for the damage already done, the Independent Women’s Forum has the numbers:

NO MORE: Over the last five years, 14,000 minors have undergone procedures, nearly 6,000 minors have had surgeries to remove and/or replace health body parts, more than 8,500 minors have received hormones and puberty blockers, and nearly 63,000 sex change prescriptions were written for minors. 

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Making Men Crazy

For decades now, American culture has been at war against men. Whether they were male chauvinist pigs or suffering from toxic masculinity, man have been systematically derided as emotionally retarded, chronically hostile, mindlessly aggressive and worse.

And, of course, as I have occasionally remarked, the therapy world is ill-equipped to deal with men and their troubles. Nowadays most therapists are female. They see mental health in feminine terms and believe that men can improve their mental health by being hooked up to an empathy drip.

Male patients consider it all to be insulting and they react negatively to the injunction to get in touch with their feelings.

Woman therapist are likely to ask this: But, how does that make you feel? No man thinks in those terms. No man has any idea what you are talking about when you ask such a question. It feels like being mothered, diminished and demeaned. It does not provide any therapeutic benefit.

Long time readers of my blog and Substack have already been exposed to these ideas. Now, we have something like a scientific study, reported in PsyPost:

A recent study published in Sex Roles reveals that “strategic masculine disinvestment,” a process where men intentionally distance themselves from traditional masculine ideals, is linked to poorer psychosocial functioning, including higher levels of distress and anger.

Jessica Pfaffendorf and Terrence Hill examined how changes in masculinity, including the shift away from hegemonic masculinity, marked by traits like stoicism and assertiveness, intersect with broader social changes. As structural support for traditional masculinity erodes, men are increasingly adopting alternative identity strategies.

So, rejecting traditional male characteristics is going to damage a man’s mental health. Being less manly is going to make you more crazy. If a man becomes less stoical and more effusive, less assertive and more self-pitying he will become more angry and distressed. And he will find it more difficult to function socially.

Through the educational system and through the mental health profession, our culture has been working to make men less manly. Strangely, this makes them more neurotic:

Younger men and those with college educations were more likely to report strategic masculine disinvestment, reflecting its prevalence among demographics exposed to progressive discourses on gender and identity, particularly in educational settings.

Divesting from traditional male roles causes people to suffer worse mental health:

Pfaffendorf and Hill observed consistent associations between strategic masculine disinvestment and poorer mental health. Men who engaged in disinvestment reported lower levels of mastery, feeling less control over their lives. They also experienced higher levels of anger, anxiety, and depression, along with elevated nonspecific psychological distress.

Making men less manly makes them crazier. Go figure.

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Hyperpolitics

What a difference eight years makes. When Donald Trump was first elected to the American presidency, the liberal and progressive left threw a collective tantrum.

It was, to say the least, embarrassing. Hundreds of thousands of women massed in the streets of Washington, adorned with what they called pussy hats, proclaiming that the Donald needed to be defeated, destroyed and obliterated lest they suffer pains that were worse than labor pains.

Writing in the New York Times, journalist Ross Barkan calls it an era of hyperpolitics. Those who lost the election believed that the nation was about to be destroyed, and that they needed to take control of politics. To them, everything was politics. Worse yet, politics was everything. 

If winning an election will solve all of your problems, and if losing an election will create all of your problems-- surely, it beats working for a living.

They started by impeaching Donald Trump, before he had done anything to merit impeachment.

The bad old days are now a distant memory, but Barkan evokes them:

But if Washington had been so frigid eight years ago, it’s easy to imagine that liberals would have been willing to risk frostbite. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, was countered by the Women’s March, which brought nearly 500,000 people to Washington alone, making fleeting icons out of its chief organizers and standing, at the time, as the largest single day of mass protest in American history….

Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Al Green, a representative from Texas, called for his impeachment, and rank-and-file Democrats reveled in the speed at which the new, incendiary president might be undone. Not a day went by, it seemed, when there wasn’t a mass march or calls for a fresh demonstration. Twitter and Instagram were hothouses for anti-Trump activism.

One might suggest that the American left had gotten itself caught up in a Biblical narrative. Their messiah, Obama, was going to save the nation from… who knows what. When Donald Trump, the anti-Obama came along to shatter their dreams by repudiating their god, they lost it. 

Truth be told, years of attacks against Trump, whether on the streets or in the courts, did nothing more than to make him stronger. By the time 2024 rolled around, Trump was electorally unbeatable.

Democrats do not seem as anguished or animated by this Trump Restoration as they were by his ascension; neither are they howling about their own party’s future. The left — looking up after eight years of resisting Trump and finding that in fact, he has expanded his vote share in each general election — is recalibrating. Some progressives have signaled their willingness to work with Trump if he embraces their policy aims, while centrists fret that the Republicans have outflanked them on too many cultural issues. Border policies that were decried as fascistic in Trump’s first term are gradually being embraced, or at least no longer resisted. The old discourse around the “normalization” of Trump is dead; businesses that once stood at a remove from Trump giddily treat him as an ordinary president now.

To put it in simpler terms, their frenzied hysteria about Trump fell flat. If the best you can offer after governing for four years, is a subliterate reformed courtesan, you ought to be in another business. 

In other terms, if your hysteria starts looking like madness it reflects on you, not on the target you have chosen. The more the left called Trump Hitler and a fascist the more people recalled that when Trump was in office he did not do the terrible things the ladies of The View predicted.

Moreover, the lawfare against Trump, the absurd charges and appalling convictions produced sympathy for him and opprobrium for those who chose to use the justice system to advance their goals.

Barkan offered this analysis:

The drama surrounding antifascism faded; now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end free elections. Another standard reflex, under hyperpolitics, was to attribute much of Trump’s popularity to racism, but that argument has struggled to sustain itself: Trump has, in each successive general election, increased his vote share with nonwhite working-class voters, flipping majority-Latino counties, attracting far more Asian voters and even making inroads with Black men.

What lies ahead, it seems, is a cooling, characterized less by dejection than by a sober realization that whatever was tried before simply didn’t work. It is challenging, after all, to maintain a perpetual state of alarm and tell voters that every election might be the last one. The anti-Trump resistance, on its own terms, was a failure. Trump is here, yet again, and he’s a popular vote champion this time.

And let us not overlook the Musk factor. Let us not forget that the wealthiest people in the country were present at the Trump inauguration, providing a patina of legitimacy and of success.

It's one thing to torment yourself over whether or not you should allow Sarah Huckabee Sanders to have dinner in peace. It’s quite another to try the same trick with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

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Sundaze

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

We have experienced a week of the new Trump presidency and many of us are pleasantly surprised. For once we have someone who is taking charge. And for the first time in ages we have someone who is an unabashed patriot.

As for how you can celebrate this event, I recommend that you make a donation to this blog. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

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Thank  you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, the times they are certainly changing. The New York Times reports that certain parents are having a problem adjusting to the fact that their young adult children are supporting Trump. 

Polling guru and uber-statistician Nate Silver suggests that we are seeing a new golden age for conservatism.

He notes that Democrats lost resoundingly in 2024. As he puts it: “their product is not selling.”

He adds that Democrats are dazed and confused. They do not have any leadership and cannot counter Trump.

Better yet, Trump has become cool. To young people this matters. It also matters that Trump is being supported by the nation’s more successful tech oligarchs. The Democratic Party is whining about this, but no one can seriously argue that Elon Musk has not accomplished great things.

Second, it appears that college students, beyond their newfound affection for Trump, have given up on Hamas:

 Hamas is getting very unpopular. In a shock twist: 18- to 24-year-olds went from being 50–50 Israel vs. Hamas (December 2023) to 79–21 for Israel over Hamas (January 2025), according to the most recent Harvard CAPS-Harris polling. Am I dreaming? Did all the teens become Boomers overnight?

Third, at the World Economic Forum, the Argentinian president Javier Milei took out after the woke minions. This comes to us from Zero Hedge:

"What once seemed like a global hegemony of the ‘woke’ left in politics, educational institutions, in the media, in supranational organizations or even in forums like Davos, has begun to crumble," said Milei, who took office in 2023.

The Argentinian politician says he's been forming alliances with other conservative figures and leaders.

"Over the course of this year, I have found allies in this fight for the cause of freedom in every corner of the world, from the amazing [tech billionaire] Elon Musk to that fierce Italian lady [Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni, from [President Nayib] Bukele in El Salvador to Viktor Orban in Hungary," he said, adding "Slowly, an international alliance has been forming among all those nations who want to be free and believe in the ideas of liberty."

Fourth, so much for climate change hysteria. Bank after bank has  withdrawn support for the global warming initiative. Now the Federal Reserve has walked away from it. 

Newsmax reports:

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced Friday it had withdrawn from a global body of central banks and regulators devoted to exploring ways to police climate risk in the financial system.

In a statement, the Fed said it was exiting the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) because its increasingly broadened scope had fallen outside the Fed's statutory mandate.

Fifth, the New Yorker, according to writer Susan Glasser, has decided that President Trump is drowning them in outrages. Fancy that:

Exhausted yet? It’s been three full days since Donald Trump returned to the Presidency and he’s already drowning us in outrages. @sbg1 breaks down the Week One distractions, late-night devilry, executive overreach, and the Administration’s infighting.

Think about it-- what do they mean by “late night deviltry?”

If the New Yorker is drowning in outrages, maybe that’s a good thing.

Sixth, As Donald Trump dismantles the DEI departments throughout the government, corporate America is joining in, The latest is: Target:

U.S. retailer Target said Friday it would conclude its three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals, joining an increasing number of American companies scaling back such initiatives.

Seventh, Libs of TikTok reports that Democrats have been hiring mental health counselors to ease their way into the new Trump era.

She writes;

Senator Eric Schmitt says Democrats in DC have now brought in mental health professionals to help them deal with Trump being in office

Eighth, meanwhile, Karen Bass is having a tough time in Los Angeles. Her constituents in Los Angeles are looking askance at her efforts to provide leadership.

The New York Post reports

LA Mayor Karen Bass’s popularity has taken a nose dive over her handling of the wildfires, with a shocking number of residents in the famously liberal city now even willing to vote Republican, a poll shows.

More than half of the people surveyed said they disapprove of Bass’ leadership, and she lags behind Dem rival Rick Caruso by 7 points in a hypothetical mayoral match-up, according to the poll, which was sponsored by conservative consultancy Madison McQueen.

Forty-three percent of respondents said they would even “consider Republican leadership” now in Los Angeles, which has not had a Republican mayor in more than 20 years.

Maybe, Los Angeles is turning purple.

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The Trouble with Therapy

If you are a long time reader of my blog and my Substack, you will find the thoughts of Nikolas Serning to be strangely familiar. 

Writing in Aeon, Serning explains how therapy has failed and how he now rejects any theory suggesting that the past determines the present.

Wordsworth notwithstanding, the child is not father to the man.

Serning offers an extended critique. For now I will share some of his observations and conclusions. He explains that he no longer believes that awareness is therapeutic and that we can solve all of our problems by solving our childhood traumas. Moreover, he suggests that we should stop obsessing about feelings and emotions.

He writes:

Along the way, over years of practise, I lost faith that awareness was always curative, that resolving childhood trauma would liberate us all, that truly feeling the feelings would allow them to dissipate, in a complex feedback loop of theory and practice.

Rather than imagine that your upbringing determines how you will turn out, Serning presents a counter-argument. He quotes those theorists who have paid attention to studies of twins separated at birth. The studies show that genetic predisposition has far more influence than family life. 

It means that the effect of your family environment – whether you are raised by caring or distant parents, whether in a low-income or high-income family – matters very little when it comes to your personality. If you’ve ever had any training in therapy, this goes against everything you have been taught.

Moreover, he suggests, recent studies have shown that childhood traumas do not determine what you will become. What really happens is that when we suffer as adults we reinterpret our childhoods and emphasize everything bad that happened.

In the few longitudinal studies that have been made, where we track children and their adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) from early years to adulthood, there is no link between ACEs and subsequent adult mental ill health. There is only a link between adult mental ill health and the ‘recollection’ of ACEs. This may seem wildly counterintuitive to a profession steeped in trauma theory. ACEs have not been shown to cause mental ill health; it is rather that, when we suffer as adults, we interpret our childhoods as having been bad. I’m convinced that there are rare exceptions to this, of truly horrendous childhood experiences that do leave a mark, but even that certainty falters when I consider the fact that events that supposedly traumatise one person in a group fail to traumatise the others.

As has occasionally been noted, the nation is awash in therapy. Everyone considers it to be a cure for whatever ails our troubled minds. And yet, the population is still suffering. And we wonder how much more suffering there would be if people were not also taking medication:

If we were all doing brilliantly now, and if all the therapies that we pay so much money for worked as well as they claim to, maybe we could feel more confident in dismissing all of that. But they’re not, and surveys of happiness indicate that many Western women – therapists’ main customer demographic – aren’t doing brilliantly either.

Among the problems that infect the field is the emphasis on feeling. I have often about the matter, but here is Serning’s take:

Feelings are seen as central, when in fact they are vague and transient approximations of a situation. The whole point of parenting a child is to scaffold and develop their executive functions so that they develop adult emotional and intellectual capabilities. This means teaching them that how they feel is not necessarily how things are, and that they may be held hostage by emotions if they don’t learn to move on from them. A child’s anger should not automatically be honoured, and their resulting difficult behaviour should most certainly not be rewarded with special accommodations.

In terms I have floated through my own posts, the trick is not to feel your feelings but to learn how to follow the rules and to function as a member of a group.

And, how well does therapy work? Serning explains:

We like to see ourselves as critical thinkers, but the critical thought never seems to mention that some 10 per cent of clients get worse after starting therapy – in these cases, therapy might be not merely unhelpful but actively harmful. If you’re told that you must listen to your momentary and subjective feelings of annoyance and hurt, and view them as your truth, minor interpersonal discomforts are much harder to let go of gracefully. If you’re then told that your troubles with relationships stem from your parents’ failure to be fully present and meet your needs in childhood, the risk is that you will become more critical of your relationship with them at a time when perhaps you need that solid family bond the most. More than a quarter of Americans have cut off a family member; it is statistically improbable that most of these estrangements are for the sort of egregious abuse we might imagine merits it.

I have recently explained my own reasons for rejecting the latest the latest therapy fad-- cutting off your family. 

No other culture that I know of believes that bad events create indelible stains on our minds, stains that forever taint our experience of the world. Bad things have happened throughout time, and they were (and are) bad enough without adding to them by insisting that some ‘trauma is held in the body’ in inescapable ways. Telling people that they have been harmed forever by others in their lives creates resentment and harms relationships. If you peddle these kinds of stories, or simply believe them, consider reading up on the shaky science on which they are founded. And while therapy talks the talk about cultural competence and learning from other ways of thinking, it rarely walks the walk. We can learn from non-Western cultures’ takes on suffering, where we stay in the now, suffer in the now, and heal in the now.

You might want to take a look at Ethan Watters’ book, Crazy Like Us, to evaluate how other cultures address emotional distress.

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