Had a good discussion with some members of one of the teams at the Vous yesterday about “kids today” and decided to do a little research today on whether “kids today” are smarter than ever or destined to lead the world on the highway to hell due to their sheer stupidity. There are, needless to say, various theories on this topic. One comes from a 2007 article in the San Francisco Gate. The friend the writer mentions is a teacher.
We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon…It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
However, a recent article in the New York Times seems to think that we are smarter than ever, though acknowledging that IQ is in a large part determined by our surroundings.
Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.
This leads us to another professor, a man in New Zealand named James Flynn, who wrote a book in which he explains what is commonly called the Flynn effect:
Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn. Nobody knows if the gains will persist, but “there is no doubt that they dominated the 20th century and that their existence and size were quite unexpected.”
So what do you think? Do you think that mankind is getting smarter or dumber? Do you think that the generation behind us is way dumber than we are or way smarter than we are? Or are public education and IQ completely unrelated, and that those who are raised by caring parents have IQs are rising exponentially from generation to generation while those who have uneducated, absentee parents have IQs that remain stagnant from generation to generation? Interested to see what you guys think.
RELATED: A more detailed account of this debate was in a 2003 article in Skeptic Magazine.
I think, as with almost all major advances in thought, the key variable is leisure time. When people work themselves to death in the fields or the factory and spend their single day off in church, there is no time to read, think or advance. That was the key to the development of a bourgeoisie in the 1700s and professions rising from the working and middle classes in the 1900s. That is why IQs are so much higher today than they were in 1917, when few people were college educated and most didn't finish high school–they went out and worked.
However, as the jaded teacher suggests, you do reach a critical mass in this process when the now well-educated parents take their kids out of the public school system, looking for an advantage on other kids in the increasingly competitive system of higher education, leaving those in the public schools with parents who neither are well educated, nor inspire their own kids to become educated. I do not believe the kids overall are less intelligent—far from it. I just think that the public schools are increasingly being deprived of those kids who are taking the next step from their parents.
Still, if you want your kids to raise their IQ, take them to Quizzo—no better use of leisure time and you can hoist a beer while your kids answer the rap questions.