The Dumbing Down of America

[gumpzilla]

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All - Let's compare two random kids who just graduated from 8th grade. One kid graduated in 1850 and the other kid graduated in 2007. My contention is that in the areas of reading, writing and math, the 1850 kid will be better educated.

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That could very well be true, assuming "8th grade" existed back then. But, what fraction of the populace received an 8th grade education then? I think if you control for that, and consider comparing people with the same proportional amount of education relative to the populace, this won't necessarily be true.

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Jesus effing christ. I'm done with this thread.

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WTF is your evidence supposed to be based on?

[mason55]

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If I were to guess, I'd say the vastly increased speed at which information now travels is the main culprit. I think there's been a paradigm shift from content being the cardinal virtue of a message to the speed at which the message gets there.

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The content of the message and the syntax in which the content is presented are two wholly separate things. In fact it seems dumb to spend more time on syntax than is necessary, as long as both messages are equally comprehensible.

[XxGodJrxX]

I said it is not far below it in SOME situations. For example, in the state of Montana, the average starting salary for a teacher is around $24,000. For a family of four living in Montana, the poverty line is $20,000.

I am not advocating that teachers be paid more, nor am I going to be arguing politics in OOT. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that there isn't a dumbing down in America. Just because you read these eloquently written letters from the Civil War, that does not mean that kids now are dumber by comparison.

What I am stating is that, compared to other countries, we do not have a public education system that can compete with theirs. The reasons that this is the case is because teachers are not paid enough compared to their counterparts in Asia and Europe. Also, the other factor is that kids spend less time in school. I don't see how anybody can argue against this.

[sublime]

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steve you owe me money and havent responded to PM's

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[DirtyDiggs]

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DirtyDiggs -
So are you saying that people were smarter in the 1800's when most of them spent all day working on the farm?

The only art and science we get from the past is the good stuff so we have a romanticized view of it. When people think of the ancient Greeks we think about all the great philosophers, but really there's only a few over the course of many many years. The average person wasn't sitting around philosophizing all day.

The people who sit around watching TV all day now are the ones who were working on farms all day in the past. It's just that we don't think about those people because we don't ever hear about them whereas today we see them all around us. Personally I think it's a good thing that we've advanced to the point where many people who do manual work have time to relax instead of waking up and performing hard labor all day just to survive.

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No, I don't think that people were smarter then and we are certainly better off now. I certainly wouldn't romanticize society then.

I'm just acknowledging that I do think the "loss of the use of brain power"(for lack of better phrasing) is likely happening to alot of the population. For the smart but not geniuses, I think they are certainly better off. The ease of information access is put to good use. I can get a cursory knowlege of special realativity in a few hours were even 10 years ago it would have been exceptionally more difficult. But do I do it? Well I got through the first 1/3 of the site, had something come up, book marked the site and havent been back. We'll see if I make it back.

We very well may be better off as a society even if we are "dumbed down." But there is a vacuum forming in the mind.

[bwana devil]

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I said it is not far below it in SOME situations. For example, in the state of Montana, the average starting salary for a teacher is around $24,000. For a family of four living in Montana, the poverty line is $20,000.


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no, you said, "MANY" situations and you used $30,000 as a teacher's salary example, not $24,000.

[FlyWf]

samsonite- People in America being stupid is not up for debate. Anyone who has ever met a person can tell you that person was a goddamn moron. I don't think we are getting stupider, though.

guids- Correct, but my point has a solution that isn't "Send everyone to private school." Hey, what a co-winky-dink, we just happened to funnel a ton of money to religious organizations and destroyed a significant ally of the Democratic party!

This pops up in every thread, but all the upper-middle-class Southern California and New York area kids on this forum need to realize their conceptions of what "normal" is financially are the very far end of the spectrum. $30k a year near the poverty line? $55k not a liveable wage?

[mason55]

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I'm just acknowledging that I do think the "loss of the use of brain power"(for lack of better phrasing) is likely happening to alot of the population.

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I guess I don't understand what you're talking about because in my eyes more people are using more of their "brain power" than ever before. More people spend more time in school, more people have jobs that require thinking rather than manual labor (in America), etc etc.

[XxGodJrxX]

Source

The average is $30,000. I conveniently chose the lowest salaried state of Montana for my example. Of course, we are assuming that the poverty line actually means anything. The starting salary of a teacher in NY is in the mid $30,000's. Whether you can live in NY with that kind of salary is debatable, but the real question is: who would want to? Not anybody that I would want teaching my kids.

[Boris]

Econ - Look at the syntax used in the replies to this thread. I might have to revise my stance. I think it's possible that the average 8th grade graduate in 1850 was better educated than the average high school graduate of today.

Exhibit A: "huh? Boris, your point was asinine when you consider how uneducated most people were during that time - people who valued education highly who were sending their children to that much schooling would likely already be much naturally more intelligent than the random Joe Prole graduating high school today, so of course he would end up being smarter. "