Pulling out a deck of cards about dead academics in 2026, the same year federal test results validated what many educators have long secretly suspected—that something fundamental is failing in American education—has a dusty kind of irony. The cards feel more like testimony than trivia.
The federal government’s most recent statistics present a conflicting picture. Nine-year-olds have made some progress, regaining reading scores from before the pandemic and demonstrating a slight increase in math. That is really inspiring. However, 13-year-olds are a completely different matter. Their reading scores haven’t changed significantly since 2023, and this is the part that should worry everyone: those figures are essentially unchanged from when the test was first administered in 1971. After more than 50 years of curriculum discussions, education reform, and billions of dollars spent on education, we are essentially back to where we were.
It’s difficult to ignore the parallel. These cards, which feature long-dead scholars like philosophers, scientists, and literary theorists who devoted their lives to the idea that knowledge is important for its own sake, now seem like relics from a society that held beliefs we are no longer certain we hold. It took time for education to become a commodity. It gradually seeped in, metric by metric, policy by policy, until earning a university degree became more about acquiring an outcome than it was about forming a mind. Right now, the UK is experiencing this with particularly harsh clarity.
The esteemed Russell Group university, the University of Nottingham, is facing a two-month exam strike from overworked staff members who are trying to eliminate entire departments, including physics, and cut hundreds of employees. a department of physics. Absent. There’s a feeling that when education is viewed as a product, the models that don’t work will eventually be discontinued.
In reality, the dead academics on those cards stood for a tradition of rigorous, uncomfortable thinking, the kind that is difficult to translate into a LinkedIn skill or a job title. However, if you were to walk past any middle school today, you would come across students who, while technically more knowledgeable than any historical scholar, are finding it more and more difficult to draw conclusions from reading passages or compare data across charts. According to a recent survey, more than half of educators claimed that AI is hindering students’ ability to think critically. That’s a big deal. It’s a structural alert.
The pandemic affected the students who are currently lagging behind during their most critical elementary school years. They have gaps that might never completely close as they enter high school. Whether the policy focus will change quickly enough to reach them before they graduate and move on is still up in the air.
Additionally, there is the question of confidence, which is more subtle and seldom appears in data. The kind of genuine academic challenge that those long-dead scholars exemplified helps young people develop something that is hard to duplicate elsewhere. A sort of proof is produced by the frustration of struggling with a difficult concept and finally grasping it. Evidence that complex problems can be solved. Without it, self-assurance becomes fragile.
Perhaps the reason those 32 cards are important now is because we have spent decades distancing ourselves from the ideals of the people who held them. Not mindlessly, not irrationally, but maybe too thoroughly. We can learn something from the scores. Listening to it is worthwhile.
