Ooops, that must be the mother of all Freudian gaffes!

 

I of course meant to say "I think most here agree that young people are NOT less intelligent - but some of us believe that education has taken a wrong turn in some countries."

Cheers, Sascha. :smile:

 

Must admit that I would have been really puzzled if a person with the scientific background of yours would have stated the initial sentence. So I apologise for asking about the obvious.

 

Well, still sticking with the scientific character, any type of conclusion would surely have had some sources to be reviewed. Gotta like that way of working things out.

 

Leading me to applaud to.

The answer, of course, is that most educators simply don't understand how statistics work.  The very definition of the gaussian curve and standard deviation says that 15-16% will always fall below the line they drew.  It was never possible to meet the demands they set up, and never will be.  When the skills of our leading educators are themselves deficient, how can we expect our students to improve.

When there's no critical review because nobody is able to really review things, when there's a 'follow orders' mentality instead of a cooperative policy and when there are leaders of any kind not being educated enough or just sticking to ideologies, there's no doubt that this will affect people negatively, especially the ones growing up in their jurisdiction.

 

I don't need everybody to know about the details of gravitational waves (like e.g. Sascha would) but I want everybody to be able to tell that the TV person is lying or at least not up to standards. White noise.

Teachers growing up could dress down students or wack a student in wood shop with 2x4. Early 90s those teachers retired or fired as parents started complaining the teachers were using 1950s discpline and methods in the 1990s does not work so well when the parents are more educated than prevoius generation. Nowdays, way more checks ane balances in society that hold people more accountable than in the past.

Few weeks ago some MIGs 29 were flying for hours above our capital (Belgrade), preparing for some army celebration. I was on the street spotting the planes and I heard one older man talking probably to his 30 year old son "this is a Mirage, you know...  it can fly at 5000 kilometers per hour". I just rolled my eyes. :rolleyes:

A lot of deep thought buried here in this thread!

 

The older I get the less patient I am with willful dumb ignorance until I get a sideways glance at my own couldn't care less attitude I sometimes example about things I do not relate to. For instance, the more I hear about the "war on terror" the less I am in terror of them that bring it. I no longer am afraid of them, but afraid of ourselves and our lack of perseverance. Perhaps I am just too weary.

 

What we see is not just ignorance but a lack of comprehension of what they take for a granted "right." Looking backward at our own war weary world deep and long, then snapping our heads around to look at the present, we really can contrast the difference between us and our precious protégé. 

 

The shallowness and false sense of security they feel will, and I fear it is not really a "might", but will see they themselves having to fight to keep, or to win back their rights that they took so carelessly for granted. What appeared so fundamental can be lost in a shift of the wind.

 

Just a thought or two...as I don't want to give the impression od disrespect to our beloved youngins.

 

Kindest regards,

The shallowness and false sense of security they feel will, and I fear it is not really a "might", but will see they themselves having to fight to keep, or to win back their rights that they took so carelessly for granted. What appeared so fundamental can be lost in a shift of the wind.

Yes, I believe so.

 

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." (John Philpot Curran)

Deleted by author.

I wouldn't count on God giving liberty, be vigilant and protect it yourself. Sometimes you have to fight for it, but it is seldom given to you.

 

Let's keep religion out of this discussion please.

Let's keep religion out of this discussion please.

I agree, I didn't intend yo, but I can see how it might be construed    Fixed it!

Some food for thought in defense of young people; The "Why cant they be like we were?" argument seems to be as old as time. (as has already been pointed out)

The very antiquity of the argument kind of self-illustrates its basic flaws.

That being said, I do believe things are different now in that there is evidence gathering that we may very well be (inadvertently) running a worldwide experiment on human brain modification on ourselves and our children with no way to foresee the results.

It don't think people are getting any dumber, exactly. I suspect its more that the target of a broad and rounded general education has been abandoned more and more in favor of producing a product: workers to fill specific and very specialized needs of a mechanized, computerized society. We have all seen the compressed training schedules, increasing demands for "multitasking" and doing more with less that has overtaken our workplaces.

Its also overtaken our education system, hacking away at "unnecessary" subjects in favor of compressed and narrowed curriculum's. This is a choice our parents, grandparents and society made and that we continue, under the monikers of "progress, efficiency and budgetary realities"

From my perspective, it seems we're all suffering from a growing case of information overload where people are becoming small, islands of data directly pertinent only to their daily lives, while being increasingly lost at sea in a blizzard of "empty calorie" stimuli

http://youtu.be/EPMYiHZV2Ro

http://youtu.be/BffyaHq1-rs

Full Video: http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791/

It don't think people are getting any dumber, exactly. I suspect its more that the target of a broad and rounded general education has been abandoned more and more in favor of producing a product: workers to fill specific and very specialized needs of a mechanized, computerized society. We have all seen the compressed training schedules, increasing demands for "multitasking" and doing more with less that has overtaken our workplaces.

 

Its also overtaken our education system, hacking away at "unnecessary" subjects in favor of compressed and narrowed curriculum's. This is a choice our parents, grandparents and society made and that we continue, under the monikers of "progress, efficiency and budgetary realities"

 

From my perspective, it seems we're all suffering from a growing case of information overload where people are becoming small, islands of data directly pertinent only to their daily lives, while being increasingly lost at sea in a blizzard of "empty calorie" stimuli

This is what I observe too! But humanity is producing new knowledge at an astonishing rate, increasing every year through opening new research fields but also by using ever increasing computational resources and sophisticated methods (eg high-throughput computing in many fields, distributed computing) allowing us to solve maths that no human could do and even finding new stuff in old data.

 

So maybe this is unavoidable to some degree, some would argue.

 

But I think this only makes it more necessary to teach people a basic "Theory of Knowledge" to enable them to process all this data crashing in on them.

 

Sascha

Both Devon and Sascha have brought up interesting and cogent points. I describe this new paradigm as "Viewing the World through a Straw."

 

This tends to reduce one's ability to obtain a macro view of the world.

Maybe adding to your points, I'd be most concerned about who controls that straw and why it was set up that way in the first place. To explain, I'm far far away from being critical when it comes to new technologies, but I'm not as naive to think that new stuff reaches the market without having one single and most prominent goal.

 

By this, the double edged sword once again strikes. The technological progress is very much able to deliver a better world with free, educated and healthy inhabitants. But it also delivers a tool on how to turn that world into one being controlled, monopolised or at least just focused on finding more users. And then some more, leaving other aspects out of the game.

 

This also affects sustainability since you can not, by design, be interested in delivering the perfect product and solution if you are existing on the basis of a steady financial income. Artificial laws.

 

To give an example. The benefits of technology and science could some day deliver a definite cure for cancer. But the market players would then have to decide about how to introduce that cure, at which prices, even at which rates since it may be more economically beneficial to not cure people but to force them to be dependant on their daily dosage. Which won't come for free.

If you Google "Are we getting dumber?" you'll get a couple of interesting hits.  One refers to a Stanford University study that says we are, and our peak may have been centuries ago.  That study is largely mathematical, and based on measureable gene mutation rates.  Another study at the University of Amsterdam says that we are getting stupider now because, in the good old days, really stupid members of any species would get eaten by other species, thereby "thinning the herd" in a positive manner.  Now, humans generally don't get eaten by wild animals anymore, so some members of our population that we might be better off without end up living at least to reproductive age, before they end up in one of those "hold my beer and watch this!" moments.

I wonder how many folks realize that 50% of our doctors and teachers graduated in the bottom half of their class! 

I also heard of a statistician who drowned while wading across a creek that had an average depth of only two feet.

january

When we invented the printed paper the scholars were in an uproar. They thought that would dumb down society.

Prior to paper we would pass information from scholar to apprentice and that process took a lifetime. Printed paper took away that process.

In fact I would credit Printed Paper as being a quantum leap forward as it led to revolutionary breakthroughs in areas such as agriculture methods and production of goods that would not have happened without printed paper.

We are seeing the same today with technology only it is moving forward at a much faster rate. I say it is for the better.

Youth today are the guinea pigs as they are the first generations to have access to the latest at an early age. Most people with a kid between 2 to 5 let them have access to an iPad, this is the beginning of that knowledge tree for a child of that age.

When I was that age I was trying to fit a square block in a square hole, a round block in a round hole...etc and this is what my iPhone looked like: