>>4534054
It's a whole slew of things. Standardized testing has failed in a spectacular way, for starters. School has become less about teaching people the principles of knowledge and more about reciting dogma. Children are increasingly shoved into a desk and told to fill in scantron bubbles or worse - complete the same process on a computer.
Rather than being shown things like geometric relationships using toys and projects dedicated as such, teachers spend hours trying to teach kids the concept of numeric base systems via convoluted math that only a tiny fraction of them would ever use if the teachers actually knew how to teach it in the first place.
Labs in science have been stripped out. Free time and social interaction has been stripped out. The food has been replaced with synthetic vitamin-fortified wood pulp (exaggerating, but seriously…), And good luck getting a class to go anywhere or do anything outside the school grounds.
It's become a prison. While one can argue the Japanese take their schooling very seriously - they also haven't completely subverted the concept of it in the process. They may be androids by time they get out of school - but at least they were forged with the intent to create honed blades for society.
We have implemented education in entirely the wrong way and shoved the responsibility of parenting off onto the state.
Of course, the IQ tests have been changing, too. As other societies become more educated and better nourished, it would only be natural that the weighted average shift such that fewer Americans fall above that average. The more retarded the rest of the world, the higher your IQ is against theirs.