American students are getting worse across the board, and the long-running excuse of pandemic homeschooling is starting to look more and more like the convenient scapegoat it always was. The decline didn’t begin in 2020; it started about 10 years earlier , when smartphones and laptops began to embed themselves in classrooms. A March article from The New York Times investigated a growing shift in thinking, with schools across the country now reversing course, cracking down on smartphones and even pulling back on Chromebooks that were once handed out as supposedly essential learning tools. An act that has only proven to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick to brainwash kids, instilling them not with knowledge about our world but with brand loyalty. Videos by VICE All of these distraction tools were handed out to kids with reckless abandon, in the hope that they would help them learn as we entered a new and wondrous technological age . The exact opposite has happened.…