My people are determined to turn from me.
—Hosea 11:7
Most of us of a certain age are familiar with the language, “a left-handed compliment.” It has its roots in the Western cultural bias about handedness and the Latin root for “left” that would become our word “sinister,” and when said of something, it is a way of declaring that what might appear on the surface to be positive is—in actuality—decidedly not. In other words, it is an insult veiled in flowery terminology.
Well, recently, the collective United States educational system received what amounts to a left-handed compliment from the most recent PISA exam. This international test of essential cognitive skills is considered the “gold standard” for assessing intellectual development and attainment in a country’s student population, and as I have written before (see The Future of… and “Reading is Fundamental”), the U.S. has historically ranked relatively poorly ever since the test’s inception in 2000. However, the just-released PISA results show American students moving up in the world’s rankings (the “compliment”) while the majority of other OECD countries performed worse (the “left-handed”). Indeed, as reported on PISA’s main dashboard, “PISA 2025 recorded the lowest OECD-average performance observed so far in science, reading and mathematics,” with reading scores declining since 2012 and math scores dropping off a cliff since 2018. In short, Americans are not the only ones getting dumber.
Which, at one level, I can live with as an educator since I know how malleable intelligence actually is and, hence, I know this trend can be reversed.
Yet I find myself experiencing something this year that is giving me pause and forcing me to confront how large the “brain deficit” generated by the past 20 years might actually be. For the first time, I have a critical mass of students who are observably post-literate, who cannot extract information from simple texts and who then accuse me of not teaching because I will not simply give out answers. In addition, I am witnessing the kind of shutting down described in a NYT’s piece about college students fleeing home after only a few days because of the emotional and cognitive demands of independence. I knew we were creating a culture of coddling, but to watch more than one of my students respond to challenges earlier classes relished by withdrawing into almost catatonic silence has been heart breaking—especially when the overwhelming feedback from student surveys over the years (including last year’s seniors!) has been how much they appreciated my guiding them to finding the answers for themselves rather than just telling them.
Of course, I know the dominate causal mechanism behind what I am observing (and the child who brings the preceding paragraph most into focus lives with headphones on, glued to the media on her computer screen). But the recent Stanford University study of Australia’s legal experiment in social media restriction has shown mixed results at best, and while any study based on only 3 months’ worth of data should be read through an enormous lens of skepticism, the reality that so little seems to have changed in those 3 months is what forces me to pause because in those same months, developments in AI have made the need to learn how to find an answer even more superfluous than it was 120 days ago.
Hence, both my growing awareness about the actual potential size of humanity’s world-wide (according to PISA) “brain deficit” and my growing awareness as an educator of just how truly enormous the challenge of fixing this “deficit” may be.
And that’s the catch-22 of this entire situation. The human brain is one of the most energy consuming structures in the biological realm, and because energy is THE hardest resource to come by for living things, evolution selects for any efficiency that can be had. It is why we develop habits, have implicit biases, and generate stereotypes—they create automated neural pathways that consume less energy—and it why breaking those habits, overcoming our biases, and rejecting stereotypes are so challenging: doing so places a much greater energy demand on the brain than keeping those same habits, biases, and stereotypes ever will.
It’s also why learning is so difficult. You are forcing the brain to expend extra energy to change its physical structure, and that’s where the catch-22 with modern digital technology comes into play. The lure of AI and social media to the brain is that it can consume less energy when it employs these programs to answer questions, solve problems, and manage affairs. Indeed, the brain experiences these energy savings at a molecular level, making it want to keep employing these digital technologies even more. Yet if AI answers all your questions and social media generates all your stimuli, you are never actually learning anything or experiencing reality because your brain isn’t expending the necessary extra energy to generate the consequent physical changes in neural pathways that authentic learning and genuine social networking require.
In other words, you can live just fine employing AI; you just can’t ever accomplish anything with it.
Which is a very difficult (nay, borderline depressing) thing to have to write if you are someone who has dedicated nearly four decades of your existence to empowering people to accomplish things with their lives. But as I’ve mentioned recently, my fellow biology teachers and I have instituted new ways to teach thinking this year in our post-AI age, and we are, in fact, seeing the positive results of our efforts. Thus, I can honestly attest that the task of combatting ignorance and making the world less dumb isn’t proving Sisyphean; I’m just starting to have to confront how utterly enormous the boulder we are pushing up the hill actually is.
References
Barnum, M. & Meltzer, E. (Sept. 8, 2026) U.S. Moves Up in PISA Test Score Rankings Because Other Countries Are Doing Worse. Chalkbeat. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/09/08/pisa-results-2025-show-us-gaining-as-other-countries-decline/.
Geraghty, S. & Goldstein, M. (accessed Oct. 4, 2026) New Australian Law Restricts Social Media for Kids. Is It Working? Education Next (vol. 26, no. 2). https://www.educationnext.org/new-australian-law-restricts-social-media-for-kids-is-it-working/.
Meja, P. (Sept. 9, 2026) Home From College, 2 Weeks Later. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/style/gen-z-college-students-quit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A1E.44kn.Hx8j3bI0Zmpm&smid=nytcore-ios-share.
