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Education, food, and Idiocracy: How we're not getting dumber
Ethan Smith
Origin name: Beart4toArlington, VARegistered User regular
Origin name: Beart4toArlington, VARegistered User regular
A friend of mine and her sister got in a conversation with me about how everyone is getting stupider, how we're only being taught to the test, and how in an ideal world we should be testing people for their right to have children.
My points were that there were 2 main ways to make sure that people are smart--
A)That they are fed during development
B)That they are educated
The counterpoint is that education has also gotten worse.
Can someone defend this standpoint? Not the eugenics one, but that people are being dumber and that we were taught better before standardized testing?
We quickly started arguing about standard testing, with me saying that while they're not perfect, standard tests force teachers to focus on actual topics rather than what the teachers biases are.
I'm sorry for the scatterbrained OP, but misanthropy pisses the hell out of me. I'll get on writing a better one when I'm calmer.
My points were that there were 2 main ways to make sure that people are smart--
A)That they are fed during development
B)That they are educated
The counterpoint is that education has also gotten worse.
Can someone defend this standpoint? Not the eugenics one, but that people are being dumber and that we were taught better before standardized testing?
We quickly started arguing about standard testing, with me saying that while they're not perfect, standard tests force teachers to focus on actual topics rather than what the teachers biases are.
I'm sorry for the scatterbrained OP, but misanthropy pisses the hell out of me. I'll get on writing a better one when I'm calmer.
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Standardised tests are also a necessary evil. Person A from Maine needs to be compared to Person B from Oregon.
I find "teaching to the test" a cop-out phrase most often used by University dropouts and media-fed children.
"If you want to work at a place like this, you'll have to go to college!"
"That's stupid, I don't need to go to college."
Hearing those words dumbfounded me. For as long as I could remember I was excited about college. Being able to study whatever I want? Choose the field I spend the rest of my life in? Make a lot of money which I can use to buy neat shit? How the fuck is that not exciting?
edit: That same school, minutes before, had a bunch of kids jumping and trying to touch a very old, very fragile, very important, and very expensive piece of technology. Since no chaperones were doing fucking anything, I shouted to the kids, "Don't touch that, its worth more than you are." A teacher later lodged a complaint against me saying that I should've used different phrasing.
Well the issue would be that many forms of tests improve memory (and knowledge) at the expense of 'higher more important skills'.
I think both are demonstrably false.
Your post's focus on standardized testing and "teaching the test", both relatively new concepts in America, makes me understand that your friends think we've been getting dumber over the past few generations. Yet a few generations ago you could have a solid career and a good life straight out of high school. Today, you can't, our educational standards have shifted to an undergraduate degree being the norm to have a professional career. And in fact there's a growing pressure for more; it wouldn't surprise me if the minimum for my children is a Master's degree. It's already the case in the business world, where you can't consider moving up the ladder without an MBA.
If you're referencing Idiocracy (as in your title) and the trend for dumb people to have more kids than intelligent ones and bring human average down, I'd argue that, first of all, intelligence is not a hereditary trait, and second, the intellectual elite has always been smaller (and therefore slower to reproduce) than the average population. In fact it was much more so in the Ancient World, where a mere 5% to 10% (in the best best of times) of the population was even literate. Yet one can easily argue that the average intelligence level of the population is higher now than it was 4000 years ago. The literacy and rudimentary math and science skills of even a "dumb" person today would catapult him to the top of the intellectual scene of the antique world.
That teacher's dumb. That was the best phrasing for that warning ever.
edit: I swear I heard the teacher rush to the group of kids I shouted at (had to shout, lots of noise and only way to be heard, this wasn't yelling) and say something along the lines of, "don't listen to that, you have worth."
According to my research, it appears that average IQ scores have been rising by an average of 3 points per decade. This would not lend much creedence to the idea that people are just getting dumber.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/95/1/29/
First and foremost, american education is great but could be improved. I think education is amazing in this country considering the options students have, and lack of a nationalized curriculum. I believe that having national requirements for learning would be better for students for example:
Requirements in Math, Reading, American History, Civics, Physical Education, and arts.
I would argue that these two forms of learning are NOT mutually exclusive and in fact med school and law school use both to make excellent professionals. All of the exams at my schools require us to remember things from rote. But only having that guarantees getting only a moderate score on the exam. To do better the exam also requires a student to apply their rote skills to a situation that was not covered in class, to test a student's ability to apply their knowledge and defend a course of action.
I think when people say "kids are dumber" they are reacting to a more basic feeling that we don't understand what the kids are doing these days, and don't understand their behaviors, therefore they are behaving like idiots. Although this is a far easier conclusion to come to (because it allows alienation and separation from the need to understand a child's behavior), i would not say that the conclusion is correct. For example: When I was young it was considered dumb behavior to play video games when other methods of having fun were available. (I am sure many adults called the younger member of these forums stupid for playing too damn many video games) Today though, as the kids of my generation have gotten older, video games are seen less as a waste of time and are a legitimate source of entertainment (no longer relegated to "dumb kid" behavior).
Honestly, the feeling I had was that it was a combination of this, and misanthropy/nostalgia, that says that we've been getting dumber.
@Richy--the argument was that it was in the last 50/100 years. My argument was that even if there is grade inflation, and even if IQ tests are bullshit, that we've been doing better and that we have more widespread education, and more regulations for that education, should speak for itself.
Do you think the average person 100 years are was more knowledgable about the world than the average person today? Or even 75 years ago? Or even 50? Or even 25?
Because I'm fairly confident in saying that no, no way in hell were they. We have the internet. At all times I have more information at my fingertips then people imagined was possible when I was born. I mean, shit, if there's anything I'm curious about I can look into it with virtually no effort at all, and so can almost everybody else. The problem as I see it is that people don't have the desire to do so *edit* and futher that even if they do far too many people haven't developed the skills necessary to filter and process all the information they'll find.
What I think we need to do is focus our educational systems more towards critical thinking skills, trying to get kids to be interested in the world around them and just learning in general. Complaints about "teaching the test" strike me as kind of missing the mark. Testing is not inherently a bad thing, just depends on what you're testing.
But suppose that it does exist, that differences are significant, and that heritable intelligence has a substantive impact (which is possible - we just don't know). If anyone tries to scare you about stupid people having children, close your eyes and remember your EC10: comparative advantage! Comparative advantage! You, individually, would not be materially better off if society exterminated the bottom ten percent alive now; why would you be better off if society prevented them from ever existing?
But suppose that your interlocutor disputes the use of static analysis. Look to the long run, s/he says. Well, generations of people are pretty darned long, and in this particular long run, short of cryogenics, we are all dead. But say we care anyway. Then remember that technology advances, and it advances at a far more rapid pace than human evolution; if (for whatever reason) you believe that somatic genetic engineering will never hit prime-time, there is always the fact that technology amplifies the useful effects of intelligence faster than intelligence decreases in even the darkest dreams of Charles Murray.
Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest. About this:
The counterpoint makes no goddamn sense. If one genuinely believes in the heritability of stupidity, so much so that one enthusiastically proposes to violate the rights of millions of people in order to save humanity from the stupidity apocalypse, then a one-off improvement or deterioration in the quality of education will generally not mitigate this. The stupid people will still breed. You would have to believe that education improves future education so fast that it outweighs the heritable effect, which frankly seems implausible, unless we find a way to imprint understanding into brains directly.
And why tie yourself to the difficult statistical lodestone of trying to separate effects over time when you can compare regions, right now, in the similar periods of time and nutritional wealth and culture, that practice standardized testing (or don't?). This puts a cap on how large the effect can plausibly be in either direction, at least.
My grandparents are old people. They think they're brilliant, and that the world is full of young idiots. My grandparents never went to college. My dad's mom never finished high school. My dad's dad didn't even go to high school.
Obviously, they know a little something about stupid young people.
That's quite possibly the best argument I've ever read in D&D.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
It's worth asking if the world is getting more complicated (especially technologically) faster than we're getting smarter, though. The issues of today aren't tariffs or the gold standard (for the most part) but whether to adopt fission power or whether to fund embryonic stem cell research.
I'm honestly undecided. It would certainly help if we could raise the average a little around here.
Global Illiteracy since 1970:
Internet Subscription Rates since 1997:
Mobile Phone Subscription Rates since 1997:
For the first time in the history of the world a majority of its population live in cities, above the poverty line, with access to information that they are literate in. Not that literacy or formal training alone is proof of intelligence. There are plenty of Phd's who are complete idiots. However it is something that can be measured and shit has been improving like gangbusters.
*edit*
Gah, transparent charts. They link to the wikipedia page now if you can't quite see the fiddly bits.
Also, remember to ask them where they got the information about 'stupid' people having more kids.
I think this is a far more interesting question. The extent of knowledge available exceeds the capability of everyone, yet even those who complain about standardized testing being all about just knowing stuff and not 'reasoning' or whatever would still laugh at people who don't have a decent knowledge of a vast amount of different topics.
In fact, I think because we have gotten smarter that we all notice when a few don't have knowledge about certain things.
That said: The idea of "smart people not breeding as fast as dumb people" COUPLED with "people have gotten dumber over a lifetime or two" should be insanely hilarious to anyone with a basic understanding of evolution and genetics and shit like that.
Rats have displayed epigenetic effects to the effect that a rat raised in a stimulus poor environment will have children that solve mazes slower for up to 3 generations. If you weren't looking for epigenetic effects, you would look at this and say that "Therefore intelligence is heritable", ignoring that if you brought up her children in stimulating environments for a few generations the effect would go away. It's uncertain if an exactly analogous effect operates in humans, but we certainly engage in a lot of DNA methylation and so forth.
But if you see estimates for heritability of IQ - of which there are a lot - it's something to bear in mind.
I think even if the data exists, it's hard to put together a viable theory because there are too many cross-cultural factors shaping each situation. Like, does it matter what your PISA score is if your country is a communist state that stifles the economic factors necessary for innovation?
Mainland China scores the highest on the PISA tests, yet mainland China is poverty-ridden and has an overall literacy rate up to 13% less than Western countries. This means two possible conditions could be happening, possibly at the same time:
- The PISA tests are skewed due to foreign corruption. Asian nations, especially China, are renowned for corrupting data by influencing control groups to achieve better scores. I mean, shit, China rigged it's own Olympics. I simply don't implicitly trust data from mainland China, or many of the Asian nations for that matter.
- The PISA tests are missing something. A nation that ranks best in the world in the category of reading, 17 spots and 55 test points higher than the US, shouldn't have 87% literacy rates, compared to the West's average of 99%.
The PISA scores list China, South Korea, and Singapore as three of the top five scoring nations, yet the peripheral data doesn't jibe with those numbers. All three nations have significantly lower literacy rates than the West. Mainland China has a PPP ranking of 96th. The US is 5th. As matter of fact, the global PPP rankings are dominated by Western nations, with only three asian nations in the top 30.
So, global scoring comparison studies are important, but they aren't the alpha and omega of achievement rankings.
I would argue that our education system isn't failing, it's actually succeeding. It's just trying to do a lot of the wrong things. We're still working on an industrial, "turn out as many worker drones as possible" model, with some left over ideas from the enlightenment about what it means to be "educated" thrown in for flavor. This is not a 21st Century educational system.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
While I agree, I think a lot the older models still apply for the severely underdeveloped nations, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where literacy rates and PPP are impossibly low. 3 out of 4 people in Afghanistan can't even read.
The real problem with the American model when it comes to comparing test scores internationally is that we try to educate all of our children (via the public education system). This isn't the case in a lot of countries, where students are tracked into apprenticeships or put to work at some point before we would be graduating them from high school. Most of the rest of the industrialized world is still working with the industrial education models too, we just insist on holding practically everyone until they're 18 whereas a lot of places they would be entering the workforce.
This sort of thing is why comparing test scores internationally is a really poor metric for determining the effectiveness of educational systems. there are just too many variables for that kind of testing to have any real value until you've basically controlled for enough things to render it a shapeless goo of data.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Exactly. But people go apeshit over things like PISA scores and relative poverty scores and healthcare data.
It's really frustrating to constantly be told how badly America is performing, when there's very little meaningful examples of such a thing.