We’re raising kids who can’t do the math — making them easy to manipulate

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?

We banned unsupervised outdoor play based on that scary 100 and handed our children smartphones — where an estimated 500,000 online predators are active each day and 89% of sexual advances directed at children occur in internet chatrooms or through instant messaging.

We eliminated the negligible risk and maximized the real one, all because we heard the numerator but never calculated the denominator.

This isn’t simply bad parenting — it’s what happens when an entire generation has lost the ability to contextualize information.

The thing is we once knew how to do this, not even that long ago. Now we’ve abandoned our leadership role in helping our children understand their world.

Just a few years ago, what parent would have affirmed a child’s gender dysphoria without understanding that discomfort with one’s changing body during puberty is nearly universal?

If grandparents were present — if we hadn’t eliminated them from our children’s lives during COVID — we’d have instant contextualization. Grandma might say, “I hated my breasts too when they first appeared. We all did.”

The same pattern plays out with crime statistics, but here the manipulation is even more insidious.

When headlines say “Crime is down,” they’re lumping everything together. Yes, overall violent crime has decreased.

But aggravated assaults are up 4% from 2019, gun assaults are up 5% and carjackings — terrifying, unpredictable crimes — are up 25% in 40 American cities that consistently report data.

Even more alarming: The lethality of violent crime increased 31% from 2019 to 2020 and remained 20% higher in 2024 than in 2018.

Translation: Violent incidents are more likely to result in death.

But you’d never know it from mainstream-media headlines because these specific, frightening crimes are buried in aggregate statistics that include shoplifting and petty theft.

During COVID, we heard “100,000 dead!” but rarely the infection-fatality rates that would have revealed actual risk.

We were told children would kill Grandma, so we kept them away from the very people who serve as our repositories of history and context.

Grandparents are living denominators — they remember previous pandemics, economic crises, social upheavals.

They remind us humanity survives and today’s unprecedented crisis usually has precedents.

Without their perspective, teenagers believe they’re experiencing something entirely new. The ugly duckling never learns about the swan.

We are turning into a population that doesn’t know its own history, can’t do basic math and can’t contextualize current events.

We treat every problem as unprecedented and that therefore requires unprecedented solutions.

That’s not freedom — that’s preparation for authoritarianism.

We’ve been living in America’s golden age — a time our wealth and safety allowed us to indulge in intellectual laziness, to mistake feelings for facts.

That time is over. Without context, we’ve become easy to manipulate.

Our competitors aren’t teaching their children math is racist or history is optional.

The antidote is straightforward: restore real education.

Teach mathematics so students can calculate rates and percentages.

Teach history so students understand patterns and precedents.

Reconnect grandparents with grandchildren so they can share the context that comes from lived experience.

We need a generation that automatically asks: “That’s the numerator — but what’s the denominator?”

A generation that hears “unprecedented” and thinks “Probably not.”

A generation that demands context before judgment.

We need to restore critical thinking now, before we learn these lessons the hard way.

We need a crash course in context, in empirical reasoning, in the basic intellectual tools that separate free citizens from manipulated subjects.

Without it, we’re raising a generation ready to be ruled rather than capable of self-governance. And that’s the most alarming data point of all.

Natalya Murakhver is a co-founder of Restore Childhood and director of the new documentary “15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.”