Use It or Lose It

Use it or lose it is the colloquial definition of neuroplasticity, defined in more technical terms by BetterHelp online in its, February 19, 2025, article “What ‘Use It Or Lose It’ Means in Neuropsychology“:

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the central nervous system to form and reorganize neural connections in response to injury or a learning event. This trait allows the human brain to adapt and change depending on events or experiences. Human brains can adapt through learning when an individual practices a task repeatedly. However, if they do not follow through with this repetition, this adaptive ability is lost, and they lose these possible new neural pathways until they return to the practice. This phenomenon is often referred to as the central nervous system’s “use it or lose it” insurance policy.

Why is neuroplasticity so important? Because neuroplasticity is the process that establishes agency in human beings, and because neurological processes can be used constructively or exploited for destruction. In my 2024 book, Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is, Chapter 5: America Requires an Education Revolution explains the concept of agency, and how agency is required for freedom in a constitutional republic.

Reading is the essential foundational skill individual citizens use to access information and make informed decisions. Together, reading, writing, and arithmetic are the communication tools that equip children with agency. Understanding the psychological concept of agency is extremely important to our discussion. Encyclopedia.com^[i] defines and discusses agency:

The concept of agency as a psychological dimension refers to the process of behaving with intentionality. Human beings exercise agency when they intentionally influence their own functioning, environments, life circumstances, and destiny. To posit that human beings have agency is to contend that they are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting rather than reactively shaped by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses.

Reading provides agency for learning because textbooks, including math and science textbooks, require the ability to read. Reading provides a sense of independence, accomplishment, and self-sufficiency. Competence is the mother of self-esteem, and learning to read is a seismic shift in a child’s perception of self. The child begins to feel his or her power. Encyclopedia.com continues:

To exercise human agency, people must believe in their capability to attain given ends. These self-efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human motivation, well-being, and accomplishment. Whatever other factors serve as guides and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to effect changes by one’s actions, that one’s locus of control is internal rather than external. This is because unless people believe that their actions can produce the outcomes they desire, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties.

Radical leftist progressive education’s primary tool of destruction exploits neuroplasticity by deliberately replacing phonics with whole-word instruction to teach reading. The consequential illiteracy rate in America today is a national scandal.

In 2021, education reformers Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman published a stunning book, Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy American Children.^[ii] The book describes the intentional exploitation of public education to dumb down American students and condition them for life in a socialist state:

The plan to dumb down America was launched in 1898 by socialist John Dewey, outlined in an essay titled “The Primary-Education Fetich.” In it he showed his fellow progressives how to transform America into a collectivist utopia by taking over the public schools and destroying the literacy of millions of Americans. The plan has been so successfully implemented that it is now a fact that half of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate. They can’t read their country’s Declaration of Independence. They can’t even read their high school diplomas.

The method of achieving this was simply changing the way children are taught to read in their schools. The utopians got rid of the intensive phonics method of instruction and imposed a look-say, sight, or whole-word method that forces children to read English as if it were Chinese. The method is widely used in today’s public schools, which is why there are so many failing public schools that cannot teach children the basics. This can only be considered a blatant and evil form of child abuse. (Crimes of the Educators, p. xii)

Phonics instruction follows the rules of repetition in neuroplasticity by requiring children to learn the sounds of letters and then teaching them to sound out the word letter-by-letter. In this way children acquire agency––they can read any word put in front of them, and a world of knowledge welcomes them in. Children taught with the whole-word method are expected to see sequences of unfamiliar shapes and memorize them. Whole-word instruction violates the rules of neuroplasticity. Educational reformer Bruce Deitrick Price explains this dynamic in two short paragraphs on pages 22-23 in his extraordinary 2017 book, Saving K-12: What Happened to Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?^[iii]:

Just for a moment, consider the silly theory that our top educators put forward. There should be no sounding out of letters and syllables; instead, children should memorize words as graphic designs or diagrams. Put yourself in the head of a kid showing up for first grade. The teacher points to a design like “xhyld” and instructs, “This means house. When you see this say house.” So, can you memorize “xhyld“?

Probably. But will you be able to pick it out from similar designs, of which there are dozens, such as: xhydd, xyhld, xhydl, xyyld, xhdyl, xyjkl, xkyht, xygld, etc. of course, you’ll need to be ready for variations such as XHYDD, XYHLD, XHYDL, XYYLD, XHDYL, XXYJKL, XKYHT, XYGLD. Okay, maybe you have a photographic memory, so you might have a chance. But no ordinary person has even a tiny chance of being literate. You can probably feel the dyslexia creeping into your brain.

The crippling insistence on whole-word instruction is augmented by the sinister campaign to replace actual learning with artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. Marketed for convenience, students are being aggressively encouraged to use and rely on free AI assistant software tools like Grammarly, which can “think” and “write” their papers for them.

It is a diabolical campaign to dumb down the student population, steal their agency, and make them wholly dependent upon technology controlled, curated, and censored by the globalist elite. Garbage in––garbage out (GIGO)! This is an information war, and our nation’s children are the target in both form and content. Curiosity did not kill the cat––convenience did! Convenience is a catastrophic humanitarian hoax that disguises its destructive intent and sells its GIGO content and surveillance capabilities as “Smart” technology.

In a stunning article posted on Gateway Pundit, July 18, 2025, journalist Ben Kew reports, “OpenAI Unveils ‘Agent’ Feature That Can Control Your Computer and Perform Tasks Automatically.” He writes:

OpenAI is preparing to launch a new feature that may mark the latest leap forward in the artificial intelligence revolution.

On Thursday, the company unveiled ChatGPT Agent, a tool designed to carry out tasks independently using its own built-in “virtual computer.”

Consider the name of the AI assistant tool––ChatGPT Agent––which is actually stealing the user’s agency in the name of convenience! In an earlier Gateway Pundit article, on June 21, 2025, Ben Kew reports, “Terrifying MIT Study Finds ChatGPT is Rotting Our Brains.” The study documents how AI assistant tools are interfering with learning and dumbing down the population by exploiting the use it or lose it phenomenon in neuroplasticity. The insidious goal of convenience is exposed as the effort to interrupt the development of critical-thinking skills that provide adults with the ability to rationally assess facts and come to conclusions based on those facts––not on their feelings.

A terrifying new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that extensive use of ChatGPT may be rotting our brains.

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab asked participants to write SAT-style essays while dividing them into three groups: one used ChatGPT, another used Google, and the third relied only on their own knowledge — the “brain-only” group.

Brain activity was tracked using EEG machines, which recorded how engaged different parts of the brain were during the writing process.

The results showed that the ChatGPT group had the lowest brain activity and performed the worst overall in terms of thinking, writing quality, and focus. …

The study warned that relying too much on AI tools like ChatGPT can reduce critical thinking skills, especially in young people.

The lead researcher, Nataliya Kosmyna, said she rushed the findings out because she’s worried about AI being introduced too early in schools.

“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten,’” she told TIME magazine.

“I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” she continued. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

We the people must understand that AI assistant software is the weaponized tool of the globalist elite and designed to alter every aspect of education to steal your child’s agency. AI assistant tools are the tactical soldiers in globalism’s strategic information war being waged against America on the battlefield of your child’s mind. President Trump’s determination to dismantle the radical leftist, anti-American Department of Education is a giant leap forward.

Chapter 5: America Requires an Education Revolution

^[i] Encyclopedia.com; https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/psychology-agency

^[ii] Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy American Children, Samuel Blumenfeld & Alex Newman, Post Hill Press, 2021; https://libertysentinel.org/books/

^[iii] Saving K-12: What Happened to Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?

©2025 Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Please vist Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and her website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.

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