The Politics of Confusion |
The Politics of Confusion
Democracy depends upon citizens who can read critically, think logically, and communicate clearly.
Jim Cardoza | March 19, 2026
Every functioning society requires two pillars that support both intellectual progress and political stability: standards and language. Standards allow us to measure performance, competence, and improvement. Language allows us to think clearly and communicate meaningfully with one another. When either of these deteriorates, confusion follows. When both deteriorate at the same time, the consequences extend far beyond the classroom.
Over the past several decades, measurable standards in American education have steadily declined. National assessments show that reading proficiency among students has stagnated or fallen. Mathematics scores have declined at every level. At many universities, remedial courses now teach material that previous generations mastered in high school -- or even earlier. Yet even as performance falls, grades themselves have risen, creating the strange spectacle of a system in which achievement declines while evaluation improves. When standards are lowered, the false impression of success is more easily declared.
In earlier eras, grades were meant to reflect mastery of a subject. Today they often function more like participation trophies. The result is that a “B” today may represent a level of understanding that once earned a “C” or worse. Such inflation creates the comforting illusion of progress while quietly eroding the meaning of academic evaluation. This decline of standards goes beyond grades, increasingly extending to language itself.
Words once had relatively stable meanings that allowed people to communicate ideas clearly. When someone used a word like “racism,” for example, it traditionally referred to the belief that one race was inherently superior to another. That definition allowed the concept to be widely understood and widely condemned.
In recent years, however, the word has been redefined in ways that........