(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Decades of woke ideology, lowered academic standards and leftist doctrines weaving their way into educational institutions have reportedly contributed to lower IQ scores.
For the first time in nearly a century the measured intelligence of young Americans, including a focus on college graduates, is dropping, according to a new psychology study from Northwestern University.
The so-called “reverse Flynn effect,” stalling a decades-old trend of increasing IQs, was found in a large sample of every IQ-tested category except one. The study found consistent declines in three out of four cognitive domains, reported Science Daily.
The declines spanned all age groups and gender, but the drops were more severe for younger participants, including college graduates. The “greatest differences in annual scores were observed for 18- to 22-year-olds,” the authors wrote.
Researchers found “Ability scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period, but scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased.”
The study, which was published in the May-June 2023 issue of Intelligence, measured intelligence tests completed by people of both sexes in their 20s to 60s. Even though the study didn’t examine any underlining reasons for the declining scores, including those from college graduates, report co-author Elizabeth Dworak said the results were telling.
“If you’re thinking about what society cares about and what it’s emphasizing and reinforcing every day, there’s a possibility of that being reflected in performance on an ability test,” said Dworak, hedging that the results don’t necessarily mean people are getting dumber.
“As scores were lower for more recent participants [younger people] across all levels of education, this might suggest that either the caliber of education has decreased … or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,” the researchers’ report stated.
“It could be the case that our results indicate a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills within this large United States sample,” Dworak said.
The bombardment of leftist indoctrination that has pummeled universities is a likely contributing factor, according to Nicholas Giordano, a Higher Education Fellow and professor at Suffolk Community College. Diversity, equity and inclusion have replaced reading, writing and arithmetic as standards of academic excellence.
“They made a mockery of higher education by offering useless courses focusing on topics like Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, and the Whiteness of Barbie. No matter how useless a topic may be, there is probably a college course for it,” Giordano wrote at Campus Reform.
“Colleges and universities also damaged their credibility by imposing censorship on campus, rather than promoting the free flow of ideas, which is fundamental to critical thinking and essential for professional success.”
