• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Without context for the numbers or their significance, this seems like another “AAH! Education Panic!” bit of discourse.

      Pretty obvious the big hit happened during COVID and now we’re in a long hangover period. But absent more meat on the bone than “Number was 500 and now it’s 460”. What’s the useful takeaway from this information? Other than to just express more generic Doomerist sentiments in the comments? Hard to say.

      Also might be worth asking, if the numbers had gone up instead of down, would anyone here be celebrating? Would it have even been posted? Case in point:

      The Test-Optional Paradox: Why Published SAT Scores Keep Rising Even as Fewer Students Submit Them

      Is this something we should be happy about or sad about?

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s

          I mean, if you’re talking about IQ, you’re misreading those statistics. It’s not the Intelligence that’s been going down. It’s the Quotient that’s been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That’s in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.

          how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?

          I don’t think the “ruling elites” have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don’t think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they’re trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they’re thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.

          That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than “Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins” is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they’re doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.

          If there’s an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it’s top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.

          They want to fuck and exploit you

          So did the Cave Man. But we’re so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we’re just getting dragged along behind them.

          • angband@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere (shitty table copy but search for it in the link to read):

            Country Peak Gain Period Reversal Detected? Approximate Reversal Date Source Basis Norway 1954–1995 Yes ~1995 Military conscript data Denmark 1959–1998 Yes ~1998 Military conscript data France 1949–1999 Yes ~1999 National assessment data United Kingdom 1950s–2000s Partial ~2000s Multiple study sources United States 1932–1990s Plateau ~1990s Normative restandardizations Netherlands 1952–1980s Unclear Debated Wechsler norm comparisons Kenya 1980s–2000s No

            https://neurolaunch.com/rise-in-average-iq-scores-over-the-20th-century/

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere

              You’re describing the “Reverse Flynn Effect”, which is still hotly debated as happening at all much less happening to this day. And it’s got nothing to do with modern-day school performance listed in OP’s image. The Flynn Effect is more neatly tied to the Lead-Crime Hypothesis, having emerged in the 1990s and largely restricted itself to post-industrial nation states.

    • reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net
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      20 hours ago

      With context the report says that the decline predates covid

      People quickly turn to explanations such as the impact of the COVID pandemic, but a decline in reading was already visible well before the pandemic hit. We cannot say for sure, but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading – skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information – may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.