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We are in an educational crisis.

Test scores in reading and math are way down.

Phone use is getting in the way of attention in the classroom.

Phone use is also interfering with completing homework.

Have you wondered if your children are getting the education they need? Do you ever worry about the curriculum at their schools? Do you wonder if they are really learning what they need to learn and whether it will prepare them for college...or for life? Do you ever wish that schools would ban phones from classrooms or that the United States would ban social media for kids under 16 so that your children could pay better attention to learning?

I have worried about all of these things. And I have also wondered whether the recent popularity of theories backed not by science but by TikTok proclamations may be a result of the failure of our educational system to teach people how to evaluate ideas and to think for themselves.

We are in an era where opinion trumps science, where scrolling social media is preferred to reading books, and where facts are no longer respected. Whatever your politics, these trends do not bode well for our children learning how to separate truth from opinion.

And due to our kids' habitual use of phones and screens, attention to classroom teaching and homework is suffering.

David Bailey reported on just this in a recent article in Math Scholar. He said that we are experiencing a crisis in education—and he cited plenty of evidence:

U.S. educational test scores are in a generation-long decline: From 2015 to 2025, 83 percent of school districts lost ground in reading, and 70 percent of districts lost ground in mathematics (Bailey, 2026).

Twelfth-grade U.S. reading........

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