The cell phone and Facebook did this………AP News: “A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading & math performance resulted in 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years. Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress. ‘Their scores are at historic lows,’ said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.” AI can’t get here too soon enough because the next generation won’t be able to read, write or do math. In most high schools today, 80% of the class typically get As for learning little. Yet the average teenager spends 7 hours a day on the phone. In the old days, high schoolers were required to read Catcher in the Rye in the 10th grade and probably took Calculus in the 12th; rarely did over 10% of a class get As. Alas, education has become a business selling access to student loans and easy degrees—it’s an “experience.” An entitlement. Most of the math calculations done to send Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969 were done with a slide ruler, before the pocket calculator was invented. And 1969 was the year of the peak in SAT scores. The ability to think critically has become a cliché on a resume.

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