[Education Alert Issued!] Japan falls from world's No.1 IQ ranking; the crisis of "Mother Tongue Collapse" progressing behind the scenes

"Footprints", a Japanese language specialized cram school for university entrance exams (Location: Iwate Prefecture, Representative: Chokei Tanimura), sounds an alarm from the current state of Japanese language education. Ten years after the strengthening of English education, the international ranking of English proficiency continues to decline. Ultimately, in 2025, Japan also lost its first-place ranking in the world for IQ. Behind this is likely the absolute lack of reading volume, leading to a decline in reading comprehension, namely the ability to infer context. AI has evolved at explosive speed by acquiring the ability to read meaning from context through LLMs (Large Language Models). As AI has proven itself, Footprints believes that what is currently required in Japanese education is the reconstruction of "contextual inference ability" through "reading and writing."

In contrast to the strengthening of English education, declining English proficiency, and finally losing the top spot in IQ With the globalization of the world, early English education was advocated, and English education started in the 5th and 6th grades of elementary school in 2011, and from the 3rd grade in 2020. In response, middle and high schools reduced Japanese language classes to increase English credits, focusing on English instruction emphasizing "communication." Nevertheless, Japan's international ranking in the English Proficiency Index has continued to fall without halting [See Figure 1], both globally and in Asia. Furthermore, in 2025, Japan surrendered the top spot in the World IQ Ranking, which it had held for many years, to Taiwan. [See Figure 2]

The fears of experts from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and others voiced in 2006 have come true Footprints views the continuous decline in English proficiency and the fall from the top IQ ranking as being caused by a decline in reading comprehension due to an insufficient volume of reading in the mother tongue (national language). As global integration advanced and people began to say that Japanese people's English skills were not improving and early English education was needed, experts in English education from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Keio University, and Sophia University sounded the alarm against overly early English education. [See Note 1] "Foreign language ability will never exceed mother tongue ability." Ignoring these concerns, elementary school English education began. More than ten years have passed since then, and it has cruelly appeared as clear numbers.

Screams from teachers in the field If the default ability, or raw intelligence, is a PC's specs, then "reading comprehension/descriptive power" in the national language is the OS running on it. English and math are just the apps running on top of that. A math teacher says, "Before even getting to the math problem, they don't understand the text of the question itself." An English teacher says, "Even if we try paragraph reading, they can't summarize a paragraph or understand the relationships between paragraphs. As a result, reading comprehension itself falls apart." A university professor says, "There is a definite increase in students who state completely different things in the introduction and conclusion of their graduation thesis, or who continuously state things that clearly contradict what they were just arguing."

Rebuilding Japan's "Reading Comprehension/Contextual Inference Ability", the answer lies in AI's explosive evolution! The teaching policy of Footprints, a Japanese language specialized cram school for university entrance exams, is simple. "For examinees, in the very end, it's a battle of the amount of practice!" This has not changed in 30 years of guiding university entrance exams. - Code-level (rules = grammar, vocabulary) questions are at the beginning of the exam and have low points. - Context-level (context = summary, description) questions are at the end of the exam and have high points. Go for the high-point questions, and if you do, you will be able to answer the questions leading up to them. This "calculating backward from the goal" way of thinking is the mindset of examinees who pass difficult universities. What examinees who make it through difficult universities have in common is that they have done a massive amount of practice, and even if there are a few black boxes, they have acquired the ability to read through the context by supplementing from the surrounding context, that is, contextual inference ability. Do you know why AI was able to evolve at explosive speeds? What they acquired through LLMs (Large Language Models) was precisely the secret to how excellent examinees improve in a short period of time: "contextual inference ability." In the Japanese language department, we call it "reading comprehension." Behind the explosive evolution of AI that began last year is an enormous volume of text reading. By reading through massive amounts of text and earnestly solving fill-in-the-blank questions, they became able to interpret meaning at the context level. Actually, this is the type of reading comprehension that Japanese people are best at, the unique "reading comprehension" of Japanese people that has been criticized from abroad as being difficult to understand.