Maybe we are just not good at thinking any more

Maybe we are just not good at thinking any more

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/maybe-we-are-just-not-good-at-thinking-any-more

2025-04-14

David Brooks  

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 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills around the world have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.

Mr Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the OECD, told the Financial Times: “Thirty per cent 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 retired general Jim Mattis and author Bing West, who was a former US assistant secretary of defence, 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.”

Dr Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute emphasises 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 towards 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-19 hurt test scores. America abandoned No Child Left Behind, a law 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 the social platform 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.

*Cultural change*

My biggest worry is that behavioural 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 author 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 encyclopaedias 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 callisthenics 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 per cent of students have been chronically absent during the 2022 to 2023 school year?

More On This Topic

Teach your kids critical thinking. It will matter sooner than you think

Reading beyond school years vital for tackling decline in literacy skills: Chan Chun Sing

In 1984, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics, 35 per cent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. By 2023, that number was down to 14 per cent. 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 Dr 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.

In 2024, The Atlantic published an essay by staff writer 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.

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 AI – 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.

*Trump tariffs*

What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you US President 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 favour. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side – from left, right or centre. It is jumble-headedness exemplified.

Mr Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature – self-satisfaction, an inability to recognise the flaws in your thinking. And of course, when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Mr 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. Civilisation was fun while it lasted. NYTIMES

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends.