Slashdot Mirror
Loss of Applied IQ Among UK Youth?
Baldrson writes "The UK Times Online reports that: 'After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."' 3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73 -- a massive loss of 27 points. Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning, it nevertheless appears to blow 'a gaping hole' in what has been called The Flynn Effect: that IQs have been rising in most parts of the world -- particularly the developed countries."
Also in this section:
Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.
Cheers,
Ian
Also, "other extreme measures" include farming fish, like salmon, in confined ponds where heavy metals and other chemicals can accumulate because the farmer does not bother to clean the water. Numerous government studies show that farmed salmon had much higher concentrations of toxic metals and chemicals than wild salmon like that in Alaska.
The key question is whether there is a correlation between the increasing contamination of our food and the behavior of the brain. Has anyone noticed the increasing amounts of psychotherapeutic drugs consumed by people in developed countries? What is happening to our brains? Did people in 1850 need to consume Prozac just to cope with their own lives?
Different times. Different lives. Young children today thing different than kids back then. I'm sure today's kids are better in other areas that matter more today than back then. Evolution.
Western society has become decadent. Everything is provided for you so you dont need to work. I see it all the time here in Britan everyone acts like they are a celebrity and are born with the right of everything being handed to them on a plate. The work ethic is left to us few....
Sometimes I get lost inside my head....
This is quite worrying. With falling numbers in technical and scientific fields, this does not bode well for the future of industry in the UK. I can see this applying to other developed nations.
Quoth TFA: "Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning"
Hmm. May explain the rise in belief of intelligent design.
And there was me thinking it was almost cool to be a geek. What I got wrong was that it is cool to look geeky, but not actually be a geek.
bang goes my karma... again...
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think that any American Slashdotter who has spent time in the general public knows that the falling average IQ is not just a problem in the UK.
I'd be curious to see the rate of IQ change amongst various western countries. Has the common "easy" life stopped working in our favor and started working against us? So many things we had to do before are now done automatically (or not at all,) and so our minds don't have to work nearly as hard to get stuff to happen. Granted, modern life has allowed us to focus more on things lik science and mechanics, but the lack of necessity is keeping many from allowing themselves to be educated.
I also blame America's increasing "stupid" problem partly on the parents that let their kids do whatever they please, with little in the way of punishment. The lack of respect I see everyday from my generation (I'm 20) is just appaling.
In what way is it a `` "all shall have prizes" culture``?
- Jax
There does seem to be a 'general intelligence' that covaries among the various intelligences. The twins data suggests it is at least 50% heritable, BUT the connection between DNA and actual performance is very indirect, and there are a lot of phenomena that *appear* to be inherited through the genome but are actually inherited via other mechanisms. "The early development of an embryo is not controlled by its own DNA, but by the architecture of the egg and by maternal effect genes." (Cohen and Stewart, the Collapse of Chaos, Penguin, 2000) There is a suspicion that the Flynn Effect reflects those mechanisms, and this result may be similar. On the other hand, the specialised intelligence being assessed is mathematical and scientific, and there is no evidence that it can develop in the absence of effective schooling. My experience as an American teaching UK students at university suggests that educational policies of the last twenty years in the UK have not been friendly to math and science.
Supporters of the IQ test will attempt to say it measures something intrinsic. Howevver, it is obvious that it actually measures a mixture of education, knowledge, intrinsic intelligence, cultural bias etc.
I've actually heard people from Mensa say that you can't study for the test.
What bullshit. You can study the problem types etc. in the same way you can study or learn about anything.
The IQ test is a crock. It barely gives an indication of the present state of intellectual achievement of the person taking it, but it doesn't really have any say on how well a person would do if they gave a damn about it and actually played around with Mensa-type puzzles and games.
(And yes, when I was 8 my parents had me take the test and I amply qualified for the requirements of Mensa. So this isn't a case of bitterness talking. Mensa is a scam, and the IQ test is deeply flawed and doesn't measure what it purports to.)
But for those "few" of us who are interested in things technical or creative, we have an unprecedented opportunity. Assuming you can find a moderately stree-free way of earning a reasonable income (not always straightforward given the climate in many modern workplaces), then the time-saving technologies available allow you more hours a week to pursue the stuff that really interests you, and to leverage those hours to be more productive. Finding solutions to technical queries was much harder before the net (Fidonet Echomail was horrendously slow <g>)
Incidentally, most of the rest are perhaps not as decadent as they might look to a depressed geek; they just need a little leadership. It's actually not that hard to do, it just takes subtlety, and overcoming the fear of / antipathy towards the "herd" that thinking people tend — quite reasonably — to develop at an early age.
You've never heard of "job seekers allowance" and "income support" have you? These people are never going to mature or get anything except 6 kids per whore they know. Anything they want they'll just steal and anything they don't want they'll break. Even the dumbest animals arn't THAT stupid,but there ya go.
Most of these people probably expect they'll become some sort of celebrity and be "super cool!". Most punks were sheep wanting to look cool, lead by a pack of kids who honestly just got really sick of the bullshit that goes around. Hell look at slashdot, we're a punk movement in one of it's purest ways. We're anti bullshit, hate the assholes "with power" (yet abusing it constantly) and we don't give a damn about the popular trends because we all do our own thing.
That's exactly what kicked punk off. But as with any trend ten million lackies latch onto it and drag it down.
I like muppets.
Why is IQ judged only on the basis of science & technical application?
Because artists don't conduct scientific studies of IQ. Ponder that for a while...
--- Attributed to Socrates
Indeed, but most have studied classics at Oxford or Cambridge, this is prevalent in all political, buerocratic and media circles. There is an institutional bias against technology, industry or science.
They appreciate the subjecture nature of the arts and humanities, not to mention it automatically suits their political outlook, Tracy Emin is a perfect example, do you think she would be able to pretend to be a scientist like she pretends to be an artist?
This goes back a long way, look at Whittle with the jet engine, he had to struggle the way through and fight for resources, in the US they threw money and resources at such people. Same with Blue Streak and our rocket programme, we managed to produce a rocket with the largest paylod of the time that didn't explode once, this was cancelled by civil servants in the late 70's just before commercial launch industry came into being. Same with aviation, Tony Benn sold our near 50% stake in Airbus on dogmatic grounds then after our domestic industry was driven into the ground we had to buy a 30% stake at some stupid cost. Same with the advanced TSR2 supersonic strike/reconnaissance aircraft that was cancelled for no reason.
Our car industry is in ruins yet last yer we exported more cars than ever, it's just that they're Hondas, Nissans, Peugeots, Jaguars (Ford), Landrovers (Ford), Aston Martin (Ford), Rolls Royce (BMW), Bently (VW), MINI Coopers (BMW), TVR (Russian owned), crap British management and attitudes towards science and R&D mean our native industry is dead.
If you're in science and don't intend to emigrate then quit and get yourself a pointless public sector job, a job in the City of London or a job spouting crap on the media, that's our only future.
There is a science fiction story that has fascinated me from the first time I read it. It's called "The Black Bag" by Kornbluth, and it's about a doctor's "little black bag" from the future. The bag is filled with instruments that any person of any intelligence can operate effectively.
That's only part of the subject of my post, however. One of the asides in this story is that in this future, technology makes it possible for anyone to become just about anything (career-wise) at least. The point was that the people who were operating the equipment were just not that bright, and could only follow instructions because the instruments were so perfectly made. The high-powered careers were filled by the mediocre, and the true geniuses were janitors with lots of free time to ponder and invent.
This seems more and more like the situation we are now in. I remember writing code in x86 assembler, not for the fun of it (although if it wasn't, I'd have never done it), but because if you wanted your computer to do certain things, you had to know what the stack, the heap, the registers, the segments, and all the other intricacies were. With the power of computers now, it's like the black bag; the geniuses write the tools, and anyone with a little ability can do the easy stuff like coding. Now apply that to your favorite technology, and mix well.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
Let me give you an example. When I was in college (Computer Studies), we had what I can only describe as a remedial course in maths. This stuff was taught in secondary school to all thirteen year-olds, I don't know how people got out of school without learning it or why it was the college's job to catch them up at the expense of everybody else's time and money. Very few people paid attention in the classes. We got to the end-of-year exams, and three or four of us got 90%+ for this particular module. The pass rate was 40%. Everybody else got 30-40%.
So these imbeciles, who have shown themselves incapable of learning basic maths not once but twice, should have to resit the exams or fail the course, yes? No. Because it was very unlikely that they could pass, and because failing them would mean cancelling the second year of the course and screwing the rest of us, the pass rate was lowered so that everybody passed.
I finished college, and went on to university. Guess what? A huge part of the first year was dedicated to repeating stuff that I had spent the last two years sitting in classes for. Why? Because half the people on my course (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence) had never written a program before in their life. And you know what? By the end of the year, they still hadn't. Not even Hello World. In all our programming assignments, we were given complete programs and told to change a couple of things ("make it print the numbers 1 to 20 instead of 1 to 10"). These people have degrees now.
I left school at thirteen years old due to illness, so I skipped a huge amount of school. And yet most people I meet seem to be way behind me when it comes to education. That's not my opinion, I think I'm average, but everybody else thinks of me as a bit of a genius. The majority of people I know haven't read a book since school unless they were forced to for work.
So how I can do way better than average with moderate effort, even though I'm at a huge disadvantage? Because most people are completely apathetic. And yet they get free passes anyway. At every point in my education, I've felt that you have to be exceptionally bad to fail at anything.
I've noticed something else in the last year that worries me. I own a horse, and I recently had to move him to a barn that mostly teaches 6 to 14 year olds to ride. Often, the parents have non-riding kids in tow, and they hang around the barn. Many (not all) of the non-riding kids have no clue how to deal with an environment that isn't entirely kid-safe. Some basic survival skills seem to be missing. They don't notice, let alone get out of the way of, horse traffic. They're unaware of what's happening behind them. They have no sense that they need to have some caution when near these huge animals and their big, steel-shod hooves.
I've seen a horse, faced with an 8-year old child in his path, stop, reach down with his nose, and nudge the child out of the way, as a horse would do with a foal. The horses have more sense than some of the kids.
These are school-age kids from rather well-off families. They're not retarded or autistic. But they have no sense of what's hazardous.
"The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture."
Oh yeah I remember it well, the establishment quaking in its boots when Johnny Rotten swore on the TV. The queen was gonna call out the army you know!
Come on, Punk was just as much a contrived culture as the last one, and Malcom Mclaren and his camp rinsed it out rather nicely thankyou very much. For one or two glorious songs the clash had a modecum of political integrity, but most of punk was us sticking safety pins in our faces and graffiting a wall, the same uterly impotent comically outraged youth as portrayed by Rik (Mayall) in the Young ones is more the truth of British punk.
Sorry to be a revisionist, but you get to see the patterns after looking back for a while.
Are you familiar with C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"? It describes the kind of nonsense that makes people who are not self-identified dorks reluctant to understand anything the least bit technical or scientific. Willful ignorance bothers me to no end.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We briefly touched on IQ (and its calculation) in my psychology studies. From what we were told, your Intelligence Quotient was basically a representation of where you sat on the bell distribution curve for your:
- age
- gender
- cultural background
- etc
Basically, the closer they could come to matching your specific circumstances to those similar to you, the more accurate your IQ measurement was. There was much discussion about how both questions and distribution had to be changed to remove cultural bias inherent in the testing. So if you were straight down the line as being average, you'd have a score (IQ) of 100. If you were below average, you might be 70. If you are above average you might be 130.
So can someone explain to me how the IQ can be dropping when it is meant to be the measure of the average? The percentage of people in the demographic obtaining a score of 100 should remain constant. I understand that the number of correct answers might diminish or increase over time, but the percentile of people scoring 100 and the distribution of the rest should remain the same otherwise the scoring is flawed.
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
Smart people can work out plenty of good solutions to stop stupid ones form reproducing, unfortunately socity has decided that trying to forcibly stop morons from reproducing is a bigger crime than bringing a child into a terrible home and offering him a one way ticket to the same mediocre life his parents had.
Oh yes, I forgot to add: this univeristy degree course had lecturers and teaching assistants that were so experienced that they included instructions on how to compile and run programs with names like 'while'. On UNIX machines. Inevitably they were clueless when everybody tried to follow the instructions and found themselves executing the 'while' shell builtin instead of their newly-compiled program (the instructions merely said to run the command 'while' rather than './while').
How are you meant to get a decent education when even the people teaching you are unqualified?
Yup, it's all relative when put in that perspective. Back in the sixties and seventies kids were probably playing with more hands on toys, rather then computers etc. It takes absolutely no account for childrens adaption to learn what is relevant now compared with what was relevant then.
For example, take all the 11 year olds who failed the test recently. Take all the 11 year olds which passed the test in the 1960's and 1970's (all those mums and dads) and ask them to program a DVD-R/W appliance or a set top box. Guess which group will be better at this task? All those "dumb" kids who know nothing about real physical dimensions but can use a different form of abstract reasoning to apply their knowledge of previous electronic experiences to the current task at hand. I'm not an advocate for kids who don't understand about physical properties of the world we live in (I liked technical lego personally - that huge monstrous off road buggy with a piston engine and a differential) but failing to recognise other talents in these kids is pulling them up short.
They are too protective of kids any more and do not foster indipendant thinking like they should. And yes some people do not give their kids good technical toys like legos robtics and chemistry sets which BTW are a shawdow of what they were 20 years ago they took all the cool compounds out of them. The Uk takes this protectionism the farthest though also they need more good hands on science in schools even in the US there is a lack of this. As a kid I rember playing with legos technics and heathkit electronics kits , those electronics labs from radio shack and making games on my old trs80 coco. Heck they gone so far they now age check the purchase of epoxy at some stores. I used epoxy for lots of stuff as a kid you can't bond metal to plastic in a robot or model airplane project with elmer's glue or even super glue doesn't work well. The nanny state mind set has to go.
Universities are supposed (ideally) to provide educational specialisation to the top 10 percent of minds. If you make them accessible to 30% or 40% then you end up with a lot of third rate minds about. Since they ought not to be there and cannot cope you either drop standards to include them, teach mickey mouse degree subjects or refuse them entry in the first place.
As has already been observed, Mr. Bliars idea that 50% of all children going to universtiy is somehow a sign of a nation of intellectual heavyweights is flawed on so many levels.
Enter cynic mode; Question - How do you keep an entire class of people quiet and obedient?
Answer; saddle them with SO much debt (student loans and fees) in their early years that all they can do is spend their lives chasing payrises and promotions in an attempt to pay it off.
Interestingly the european country scoring best in almost all educational comparison tests (Finland) has abolished streaming or the concept of "failing" a year and having to repeat it years ago.
I don't think there's a simple answer to any of these questions, making test harder won't automatically make people more intelligent...
I hate everything you've just said. It spits in the face of what we'd call progress, but I also hate that there is , if not poorly phrased, an element of truth in what you say.
Our current, national philosphy is that all children are equal, and that good education, housing and an X-Box are all that stands between them and a succesful future in the service nation. It's not working.
I'm surrounded by teachers, I've done my PGCE, and I've got to tell you, all children arn't equal. Not even close. Some children get 6 hours of school, and then love and attention at home, and all the resources they need to become the next Babbage or Einstein, but they come out of school with C in their GCSEs, they just don't have the ability. Other kids don't get even a fraction of that support, and yet they become world leaders. Nature, is often stronger than nurture.
Look at ANY classroom in the UK, and even by Year 1, there is a large enough gap between some children that it can be measured in years, and yet they progress regardless ability. By Year 9 there is normally at least one child in each class that could sit and pass their GCSEs, and yet they are often forced to wait another 2 years. In Shropshire, we have a couple of schools that are given in the region of £25,000 a year per child in order to take children with behavioural problems, at yet there are no, state run, centres of excellence. I often wonder if we are throwing money at the wrong end of the spectrum, or at least not distributing it enough.
That, and our economic situation means that you need a degree to get a job in retail management. You now need to get a Masters or a PhD in order to get your CV to stand out, which means that the nations brightist don't hit the job market until they are 25.
Your Darwinist stand point has a strong smell of truth about it too. I'm 26, been to university and earn twice the national average, even though I'm only three rungs up from mail boy on my corporations ladder. I can't afford to raise a family, or buy a house in my area, because my girlfriend is training to become a teacher. The only people I know, at my age, who have had children and own a house are those who survive off state subsidies and a factory job or equivalent.
I don't want to see people starving in the streets. I don't want children to be left behind just because their parents didn't understand birth control (or that alcholol doesn't work as a spermacide). I don't want to see children who have learning difficulites left behind, when all they really need is an extra year in reception. But that doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't have to contribute in order to get these benefits, I just don't know what contribute means anymore.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!