We’ve created a generation — parents and children alike — paralyzed by numerators without denominators.

A single alarming number, stripped of all context, deployed to trigger fear and compliance.

And it’s working because we’ve lost the ability to ask the most basic question: compared with what?

The problem is no longer theoretical.

At University of California San Diego, one of America’s highest-ranked public universities, 12.5% of incoming freshmen require remedial math courses covering elementary- and middle-school material.

When asked to solve a simple equation, more than 80% of these students couldn’t do it. About 20% couldn’t even correctly count coins.

The number of students needing remedial math jumped from 32 in fall 2020 to 921 in fall 2025 — a nearly 30-fold increase in five years.

These are students who got into a selective university. They can’t calculate denominators because they can’t do basic math.

Here’s how this plays out: About 100 children are abducted by strangers each year in the United States.

See that number and your blood runs cold.

But here’s the denominator: about 72 million kids ages 0 to 17.

That’s 1 in 720,000 odds — your child is more likely to be struck by lightning.

So what did we do?........

© New York Post