A new study has found that the vocabulary and reading standards to take and achieve a decent score on the SAT have dropped astronomically in the last few decades. As someone who personally took two different versions of the test and saw this happening in real time, this does not surprise me. But in the long run, this is exactly what the Marxists who took over American education wanted.
We all know that American education has been losing quality over at least the last 50 years, if not even before that. The education my grandmother received in high school was better than most college education today, and in all honesty, I have seen grade school tests from American frontier days that I would barely pass (and I had a much better than average modern education).
Nathan Hale and Alexander Hamilton came out of college able to hold debates in Latin, and now many people with master’s degrees don’t have a grasp of basic English grammar. There are math professors who use AI because they can’t solve their own equations, and English teachers who haven’t read a book in years. There are science teachers in public school who claim that it is possible to change one’s biological sex, and there are history teachers who assert that the 1619 Project isn’t bunk. Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research stated this year that American test scores are in a generation-long decline, and last year, math and reading scores hit record lows. Even Ivy League schools have to offer an increasing number of students remedial courses, and now we have this report from Thomas Aquinas College.
TAC compared SAT tests from 1980, 1987, and 2026. The reading section in particular has changed drastically in that time. Instead of challenging students in order to identify the best academics, the standardized test is now aimed at making it as easy as possible for as many students as possible to eke out a decent grade, even if they didn’t put in much effort.
• Shorter passages, less than a third of their former length
• A sharp drop in the number of vocabulary questions requiring independent word knowledge, from 60 per test to 10
• The near elimination of argumentative and persuasive readings from the test, replaced by expository texts
• Replacing reading passages that assumed prior knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader with texts that reveal their meanings through contextual clues
This was all on purpose. Of course, it is true that many teachers and professors now are much less qualified and much more ignorant than teachers and professors of the past, so that means that standards for college students automatically drop. It is also true that colleges have decided to become woke propaganda mills and trade schools. Instead of studying geometry, astronomy, and the classics of Western civilization, students can choose from hundreds of majors that include such nonsense as LGBTQ Studies, Victim Studies, Social Media Communication, Puppetry, Feminist and Queer Theory, Floral Management, and Pop Culture.
Thomas Sowell has written many times on the subject of how socialists turned universities into essentially a woke certification program for numerous jobs that should never have required a degree. Furthermore, the idea of sending as many people to college as possible is to ensure that all these young people come out with the same political and cultural views, ones which are poisonous to America.
This is why a record number of young people (62%) favor socialism over capitalism, not because they have any idea what either means, but because they have all been told in school and at college that socialism is marvelous. Only about four in 10 young Americans are proud to be American, as of 2025. Also in 2025, 60% of Gen Z Americans said they supported Hamas, a literal terrorist group, over Israel. These are the voters who will determine the future of America, and universities have turned them into Jew-hating, America-loathing, socialist activist morons.
At least as of the 1930s, but really beginning the decade before with the Frankfurt School, Communists were beginning to have a significant impact on and presence in American education. Power Mentor states:
Throughout the 20th century, Marxist revolutionaries recognized that a direct violent uprising was unlikely to succeed in the United States. Instead, they developed a strategy based on infiltrating and subverting key cultural institutions—particularly the education system, the media, and civic organizations. By gradually influencing thought leaders, teachers, journalists, and policymakers, they intended to reshape American society from the inside out, replacing its capitalist foundations with collectivist ideology.
This strategy, often referred to as the "Long March Through the Institutions," originated from European Marxist thinkers but found fertile ground in post-war America.
Communist countries often have higher literacy rates than other Third World countries, but only so that the citizens can imbibe packaged propaganda. Similarly, our socialists and elitists want an American population that is ignorant, entitled, emotional, unskilled, and therefore easily manipulated.
