https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-recipe-for-idiocracy/ar-AA1QJFd6

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.

The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.

https://www.thefp.com/p/confessions-of-a-former-pro-palestine?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

A former anti-Israel student activist tells Maya Sulkin how campus groupthink turned Hamas’s October 7 terror attack into a litmus test for moral virtue, and what changed her mind when she finally stepped outside the movement. Watch it here.

‘It felt critical to voice your opinion early and as often as possible, in order to be a true ally. If you were silent on the matter, you were contributing to genocide.’

When I saw a viral video of Taryn Thomas speaking at an October 7, 2025, vigil at Stanford, I knew she was unique. That’s because only two years before, she was a part of the pro-Palestine movement on her campus.

After Hamas’s attack on Israel, Thomas took part in the first encampments that appeared on campuses across the country and fully submitted to the groupthink that Hamas was a legitimate resistance group. She marched with people who wouldn’t dare associate with Zionists, and accepted an invitation to see the Nova exhibit in Los Angeles only so she could report back to her friends about the “Zionist propaganda.”

But that’s not what happened. Thomas says seeing evidence of the Nova festival and what truly happened on October 7 opened her eyes. In the months that followed, she took a trip to Israel, listened to the firsthand experiences of Israelis and Palestinians, and made friends from the Jewish community on her campus.