For decades, schools have followed a policy of promoting students regardless of whether they meet established standards, often justified by the belief that students will “catch up” when they “find their passion.”

However, many never do, and for reasons rooted in basic biology. The brain allocates energy to a task only when it expects a reward, meaning that engagement decreases as the gap between a student’s skill level and the demands of coursework grows. Additionally, the brain relies on rewards to learn, but when the rewards for not learning are the same as those for learning, students face a dysfunctional incentive structure.

This system often leads students to disengage entirely when they are promoted beyond their skill level, halting their skill development. As a result, students can reach high school—and even college—without mastering basic skills. This seemingly improbable outcome is perpetuated by two cultural factors: first, no alternative pathways to success are emphasized, and second, students have every reason to expect they will continue to receive passing grades without doing the necessary work, as that pattern has been consistently reinforced throughout their education.

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What can universities do when so many students lack basic skills?

Real education is not possible, so colleges need an alternative raison d’etre. Political activism has perfectly filled this role, and mental health goals have contributed to an additional non-educational purpose for educational institutions.

You may think causality flows in the opposite direction. I thought that, too, when I was a young professor with young children of my own. But I was shocked to observe that professors’ children often struggle academically. That violated the widely accepted belief that socioeconomic disadvantages cause learning difficulties. According to the prevailing culture, “privileged” students are not supposed to have learning problems.

This failure of our explanatory framework has been addressed by “diseasifying” the problem or just ignoring it. But I wanted the truth because my kids’ future was at stake. I wanted to know why so many kids don’t learn. I’d always been told that some kids are deprived of education, but no one told me that many kids reject the education that’s offered to them.

I didn’t find the answer until my kids grew up and I had time to study the brain. I learned that neuroplasticity peaks by age eight, so a kid who doesn’t learn a basic skill by then will have difficulty picking it up. They can learn, but they’re not likely to just pick it up by sitting in a class where they don’t understand what’s going on.

What happens to these students?

Students develop “compensatory skills” when they fail to learn basic skills. This can include being cute, funny, depressed, or aggressive. Students also build the skill of gaming the system. They realize that teachers want to give them “points” to avoid the stain of failing a student. They learn to get “points” in ways that include strategic negotiating and outright cheating. School becomes an empty ritual.

Universities offer remedial courses as if long-standing deficits can be filled in a few months. When the remedial level ends, many students are still not prepared for college-level work, but they’ve been well-prepared for activism and mental health agendas. So, it’s easy to see why it would be hard for universities to let go of these alternative missions.

What can be done?

Social promotion is rooted in the premise that it’s cruel to hold a child back, so the policy can be challenged by showing that it’s crueler to push students into classes beyond their skill level.

Imagine the anxiety of sitting in a classroom where you don’t understand what is going on for years on end. Imagine the panic of a child called on to read after years of covering up their inability to read. Imagine the wasted resources.

We don’t have much data on the true cost of social promotion because it’s hard for researchers to transgress the prevailing consensus. But enterprising researchers could easily find the evidence. Prisons are a good place to start, as many inmates are known to be functionally illiterate. We may say they were “deprived” of education, but they have a lot to say about how they evaded education while physically being there.

It’s cruel to leave a child in a classroom where they don’t understand what’s going on. It’s cruel to train a child to “fake it.” If they reach a point where their “compensatory skills” stop working, they won’t even know why because we don’t know what we don’t know. They will believe that some injustice has been committed.

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Responsible adults should not let this happen.

Responsible adults should not defer to children who say, “We’ll never need to know this.” Instead, they should design opportunities to build skills at the student’s level and not pass them on until the skill is mastered.

The scientist Edward Teller said you cannot learn something unless you almost know it. Great knowledge comes from many tiny steps because big neural networks must be built by connecting individual neurons. Neurons don’t connect on their own. They connect from being activated by challenges that the person can succeed at with the neural network they have.

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