Or... you know, we go with the data.

The data shows improvement until 2019 and then a decline in 2020/2021 coinciding with COVID, lockdowns and inability to attend schools physically.

The global pandemic seems like a much better explanation to the data the article is showing.

You're saying it's the two years when kids almost entirely paused schooling to any notable degree because they had no local oversight, and not the participatory trophy nonsense that boomers have been complaining about for the past 20 years despite them being the ones that made it a thing in the first place?

I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!

This might make sense if:

1) I hadn't heard people making exactly the same argument since I was a kid in the 1970s,

2) I've read even older accounts making identical claims,

3) there was no correlation with covid,

4) western society hadn't had many changes over the last 150 years in the way learning is done. (My grandfather's high school education was very different than mine, as I describe out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 .), and

5) education in the US, except of the children of the rich, has always been intimately connected with politics. If there were a golden era where education wasn't ruined, then it was because of politics.

WRT point 1:

> "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

> ~ Socrates

One human constant seems to be thinking that future generations are the worst.

Can you be more specific? which ‘different group’ has an ‘emotional need’ that prevents learning math concepts?