As humanity wrestles with the increasing probability of an AI-induced extinction event, one adverse effect of using artificial intelligence is already upon us: It’s making students dumber.

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AI has become the default shortcut in American high schools. Tech use is pervasive, and a whole lot of it is outside the rules.

• A new nationally representative survey from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that 62 percent of students polled spend more than half their classroom time on a school-issued device, and 76 percent admit to some form of illicit tech use—watching YouTube, scrolling social media, messaging friends, shopping or gambling online—in class, every day.
• More than 1 in 5 students admit to using AI without permission. About half of respondents admit to using chatbots to solve math problems; 36 percent to using them to summarize books instead of reading them; 29 percent for writing the first draft of an essay; 26 percent for help during quizzes and tests. Cheating, in other words.
• The figures are worse when students report on their peers’ AI use—which is probably closer to the truth than the self-reported numbers: 56 percent say most high schoolers use AI in class when they have been instructed not to; 62 percent agree that most high school students use AI for assignments when they’ve been instructed not to; 58 percent say homework has become meaningless because nearly everyone uses AI.

What are the effects of all the tech use on these students? The latest report from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures skills of 15-year-olds worldwide every few years, found that students who admit to using AI to summarize or draft their schoolwork are roughly a full year of schooling behind their peers who don’t.

• In science, students who use AI daily to draft their assignments are 1½ years behind their peers who don’t.

The pisa report said:

Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read. In turn, the share of “hasty readers”—students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers—almost doubled between 2018 and 2025. In a world increasingly flooded with information, our students are less likely to think deeply and separate signal from noise.

Yet you wouldn’t know it by looking at their grades. Back to the Fordham report on American students:

• 57 percent report earning all or mostly A’s, including 44 percent of students who scored below 1000 on the sat—roughly the bottom half of the national distribution. AI use—added to dumbed-down curricula, unlimited retakes and partial credit for unfinished work—produces raging grade inflation.

Reasoning is what most distinguishes man from every other creature God made. As Hamlet said, God “gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.”

• Yet human nature is lazy. When children are handed a shortcut—a machine that thinks for them before they have learned to think for themselves—they will nearly always take it.
• As the report’s authors put it, “We do not become fit by watching sports but by doing sports.” The struggle a mind goes through to solve a problem is not an obstacle to learning. The struggle is the learning.

In Jesus’s parable of the talents, the servant who buried his one gift rather than use it was called “wicked and slothful” (Matthew 25:26), and the gift was taken from him: “For unto every one that hath shall be given … but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (verse 29).

• That’s what is happening to young people who are burying their God-given gift of reason: It is being taken from them.

Do all you can to protect and nurture this gift—both in your children and yourself. It is essential for God to be able to impact your mind. Learn about the wonderful purpose for which God gave us this gift in Herbert W. Armstrong’s free booklet What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind.

State Department Green-lights Saudi F-35s

The United States State Department approved a $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighter jets and associated equipment to Saudi Arabia yesterday. If approved by Congress, Saudi Arabia will become the first Arab country to fly the F-35.

• Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been trying to obtain the fifth-generation stealth multirole fighter for years. U.S. President Donald Trump first announced the sale in November 2025.

Why now? The State Department’s approval comes as Saudi Arabia is getting sucked into war with Yemen’s Houthi terror group. The Houthis have declared war on any shipping heading to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports and have consolidated their influence over the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the waterway connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean.

Is this smart? The only Middle East military that currently operates F-35s is Israel. Selling the F-35 to countries like Saudi Arabia negates that strategic advantage.

• Al-Monitor reported the Israel Defense Forces sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz the day prior, expressing “deep concern” that the sale will “undermine Israel’s exclusive attack and penetration capabilities ….”
• According to the New York Times, the U.S. Department of War and other intelligence-affiliated departments are worried that selling F-35s to Saudi Arabia could also give China a means of obtaining and examining the warplane’s sensitive technology for electronic and airframe vulnerabilities. China and Saudi Arabia have a close relationship.

The F-35 is the U.S. military’s most advanced mainline fighter. The U.S. generally gives such technology only to nations it trusts. A prophecy in Psalm 83 includes “the Ishmaelites,” ancestors of the Saudi Arabians, participating in a conspiracy “that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.” This includes not only the State of Israel but also the other nations that descended from the other tribes of ancient Israel: nations that include the United States and Britain. Giving the Saudis such sophisticated and sensitive military technology could factor into this.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains more in Chapter 4 of his free booklet The King of the South.

French Candidate Wants a ‘United States of Europe’

Former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal promised yesterday to “give birth to the United States of Europe” should he win France’s presidential election in April.

• The late Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Plain Truth, predecessor to the Trumpet, repeatedly emphasized the exact phrase “United States of Europe” in his forecasts for Europe’s future.
• Bible prophecy warns that European unification is really a reiteration of what it terms “the beast,” the violent Holy Roman Empire.

Attal wants to remove trade restrictions between member states, introduce joint European debt, and merge major companies across the Continent to make Europe more competitive with China and the United States.

In the speech, given to lawmakers and former government officials at an aerospace start-up, he advocated for a two-speed European Union.

• This plan, often advocated by pan-Europeanists over the years, would more forcefully unite a smaller number of European nations and leave other current EU members with comparatively more sovereignty but fewer benefits.

Such measures will eventually succeed and help establish a unified European superpower, but only after Catholicism and the Vatican bind Europe together with a common religion under a forceful religious authority.

• Mr. Armstrong warned in 1950 that European states would distrust the U.S. and form “a united states of Europe.” He based that prediction on Revelation 17, which prophesies seven resurrections of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire slaughtered millions for religious beliefs throughout history. Its last iteration, led by Nazi Germany, was responsible for World War ii, in which roughly 70 million people died. This rising iteration of that German-led empire is prophesied to be even worse.

IN OTHER NEWS

China is constructing a drone-launching mothership: China is building the world’s first mothership capable of carrying and deploying advanced submarine drones, Naval News wrote on Tuesday. Satellite imagery of the vessel under construction at Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding in Shanghai shows that it is designed to transport four of China’s uncrewed xxluuvs or a greater number of smaller uncrewed submarines. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warns that China’s growing naval power and tightening grip over the waters near its periphery should alarm the world: “China Is Steering the World Toward War.”

Trump threatens tariffs against EU: U.S. President Donald Trump said yesterday he would “put very serious tariffs” on the European Union, or even “stop trading” with it “on many things,” if he deemed its efforts to make Canada an associate member to be a “hostile act.” The EU indeed has hostile motives for developing an alliance with Canada.