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Spoiler Alert: Smart Kids Become Successful Adults
itwbennett writes "Researchers from the University of Edinburgh set out to test the long-held assumption that kids who performed well in school at a young age carried that early success through to adulthood. And prove it they did! Specifically, 'Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later.' Early success even correlates 'over and above associations with intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status in childhood.'"
Math and reading ability at age 7 and socioeconomic status of the parents.
Socioeconomic status and socioeconomic status of the parents.
So has this study really shown anything other than the transitive property?
...does being smart lead to a more stressful life? Realizing how much you still don't understand, grasping the bad state of some things in world, feeling the general existential pain and philosophizing things, and so on.
First define successful adult. Success means different things to different people. I know a lot of people with no more than an 8th grade education that are successfully supporting their families and are genuinely happy people.
Success like food, shelter and passing on your genes?
Or success like a big house, fancy car and a vapid meaningless life?
I thought this was slash dot? I somehow stumbled onto Oprah's website?
sh*t i'm 30 and was smart at school i believe the study, it just means i'm not an adult yet
Privileged kids do have advantages. There's no doubt about it. I think examples abound of people succeeding in spite of adversity though.
Far more examples of kids not succeeding partly due to it as well.
Either way, too many factors to just tie it to one thing.
I've always felt that performing well in school is less a measure of intelligence and more a measure of one's ability to follow rules, complete assigned tasks, get along with teachers and classmates, and behave in socially acceptable ways. It even seems like highly intelligent people often perform worse-than-average in school because high intelligence often comes along with lower-than-average social skills (or a disinterest in adhering to social norms).
And this is why we need good teachers in the school system when the kids are at a young age. This is how I would re-organize the Canadian school system in Ontario:
1) Religion in schools need to be cut. Replace Religion with math and science, math and science promote logic, God promotes making up stories because we want to.
2) Teach math and science harder, really push them as corner stones of education, if students aren't getting the concepts increase class length. I would say by grade 5 you should be comfortable with variables.
3) Every day should have a gym component where kids are FORCED to participate,
4) Science class should contain hands on experiments and labs. If you can't test it, don't teach it.
5) Find a way to make homework interactive, not just copy question out of a book.
6) Computer Programming should become a mandatory class starting in grade 4, get kids playing with visual languages, they massively help you learn and work out logical problems that be applied in other areas.
7) Music class, make kids learn instruments or at least get involved with Music, this will allow there creative abilities to expand.
8) Don't let the kids sit more then 1 hour at a time, make sure they're moving around and getting involved in the class.
Those would be the initial adjustments I would make, I'm sure it's not perfect but it's a FAR better system then one currently in place.
Well, People generally comment on this site that basic research can lead to unexpected outcomes, new questions. It's entirely possible that all of this data can help support something new that we haven't thought of yet. I understand that this isn't basic research, but I feel that it could be applied here.
Dumb people tend not to stay rich for very long.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Intelligence isn't a myth, it's a real thing. The myth is that intelligence is static, that nothing can be done to improve your intelligence.
You could start your journey to intelligence by becoming more knowledgeable: read the article and learn that the researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status and privilege.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I agree with you but more importantly we need good parents. Less babysitters, less nannies, less ipad, less facebook, less drinking and drugs.
Parents should spend time with their kids and be available to help.
Headline: ...Smart Kids Become Successful Adults.
Article: Math and reading skills correlate with success even more strongly than intelligence.
I can't quite go that far with you. There is no doubt that everybody's brain is built differently, and this can greatly affect what is easy for that person and what is difficult. An extreme example would be someone who has dyslexia. It is no myth that such a person has much more trouble reading at age 7, and this (probably) has nothing to do with their socioeconomic status.
However, as someone with a graduate degree who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, it is quite true that some of the smartest, most driven people I grew up with had trouble just getting out of the old neighborhood. Meanwhile some of the stupidest people I have ever met were PhDs and program managers (nothing against those folks. The smart ones can indeed be brilliant). I can't vouch for the family backgrounds of the stupid people (because I try to avoid them), but from my old neighborhood it was 100% the case that friends of mine growing up in the projects and/or in really rough neighborhoods had the most trouble moving on to college.
It's a lot easier to get the time and attention of a parent if they're not working two crappy minimum wage jobs to try and make ends meet. Privilege is incredibly relevant.
It seems pretty unsurprising that superior academic achievement in childhood would, on average, lead to somewhat better professional outcomes, at least within the "what part of 'middle class' does your salary put you in" band of professional wage labor.
I'd be curious to know what the data look like at the extremes of the distribution, though: "The data suggest, for example, that going up one reading level at age 7 was associated with a £5,000, or roughly $7,750, increase in income at age 42." So, people who earn, say £60,000 probably had better average performance at school age than the £50k or £40k tiers. What about the people who earn £600,000? There aren't even enough reading levels available to explain that. Is the relationship nonlinear(with each incremental increase in early performance carrying a greater incremental increase in outcome?), does correlation simply break down above(and possibly below) a certain adulthood salary band?
yep, you can be really smart, but if you can't sell yourself well and are insecure, you won't go too far. Networking in general is much more important than raw brainpower once the baseline requirements are met.
Actually, the article says the exact opposite of the title. The title should say
Spoiler Alert: *SUCCESSFUL* Kids Become Successful Adults
because the article says:
These findings imply that basic childhood skills, independent of how smart you are, how long you stay in school, or the social class you started off in, will be important throughout your life," say Ritchie and Bates.
When you come up with an answer like this, it raises the question, "What is the causal link?"
They dismiss both intelligence and socioeconomic status, and yet I would guess that there's some connection between reading/math ability and intelligence/socioeconomic status. Dumb children with poor uneducated parents are probably not doing well on these tests. Also they seem dismissive of the role of later education, though I'm sure that early test performance affects subsequent educational opportunities.
It seems like they may have found a statistical correlation without explaining what it actually means.
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism? Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
Yeah, the most annoying thing about discussions about intelligence is that everyone just assumes that Intelligence = F(x), then argue for an hour about what x is. The obvious reality that bypasses this whole argument is that Intelligence=F(x,y,z,m,n,a,b,c,d,e,f,g...), and that success is another function G(F(x),a,b,c,d,e,g...).
My very personal experiment is still pending any tangible proof of success.
In a related 'duh' study: public education can be rather shit - even in low student count, rural settings.
Grades are mostly a sign of being socially integrated/assimilated and stupid memorization instead of smarts, at least in my experience. We had some teachers who went for one or two "combine your knowledge/derive your own" questions at least in some tests and these were usually the ones where the "good" students all failed miserably and complained afterwards that it was not in scope ;)
This is true for developed countries where the children who excel in those subjects can find a job where that matter. Whoops! Forgot to include most of the population in the world where this study will fall apart due to opportunities.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Everyone is asking "what is a successful adult" and that is valid as that was not presented in the case study. However I am also wondering what is determined as "successful" in terms of schooling? Are you talking arbitrarily the grades someone made? Are you talking scores on standardized tests?
All I can say is that people who do well in school at a young age tend to do well as an adult. That is what the study states. However I would also add that it is not necessarily all inclusive as many people don't do well in school (at a young age) but succeed in life as well as academically.
It's still right. If you show that people who perform well at age 7 are likely to perform well as an adult is says absolutely nothing about if you perform poorly at age 7. It's also statistics. Even if the relationship were true in the negative, anecdotes like yours are merely parts of the sample which have high deviations from the mean.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I would argue that social standing and that of your parents is a better predictor of your future success.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/162936707/movin-on-up-that-may-depend-on-your-last-name
It might be wrong if they said that every single kid that has high grades will make exactly $7,500 more, but they didn't.
... still waiting for that success though.
I can show you straight A students who's life became a total tragic wreck. I can show you a C's & D's student who became a successful & happy adult. Our current socialized childcare(AKA public school system) with their GPA's & Competitive academics, will one day be viewed in the same light as the medical practice of bleeding out the bad blood: harmful and counterproductive. I'm sure Murdoch5 would agree that schools too often lack the very core of learning: creativity.
However, there still is a big problem with kids in lower socioeconomic status obtaining higher grades
Not at all. There is a problem with how society teaches kids, and it's just the case that some richer parents can overcome this handicap for their children.
I was homeschooled at an early age. As part of that I did a number of things with groups of other homeschooled kids. Many of the parents were poor (my own included). But because schooling at home is so much more productive and meaningful most of the children did really well, and all of the ones I kept in contact with have done well later in life also.
There is no problem being poor and being able to learn. Kids can learn in so many ways, many of them costing nothing or being free. You simply have to get out of the way and enable the spirit of exploration which is natural, instead of trying to crush it via conformity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What? Someone's gotten into the cultural marxism koolaid...
Making large salaries is not a privilege, but quite a burden on time and health.. They are earned just like any other. The money's nice, but for anyone besides the multimillionaires, it's a lot of work. Instead of two 8 hr shifts in two crappy jobs, it's one 16hr shift at one crappy job, salaried so you're on it 24/7 until you retire, get fired for losing it to passive aggressive office politics, or die.
The problem is that leftists have convinced the culture that the lifestyle of a $100k/year salary is just as 'privileged' as someone with 50million in the bank.. The latter could retire at any time and live in luxury for life, the former can't.
When you find a correlation in statistical data you don't get a prediction for the FUTURE. You just get a statement of what was (in that data from the past). If you want to find out if you've got something that can make a prediction, you have to actually MAKE one (a prediction), i.e. you have to predict something that WILL show up in FUTURE data. Only if it does that do you have something. Proving "backwards" on the time line is not a "prediction", you cannot use the same data you used to create you hypothesis to also prove it. Otherwise, whatever coincidental correlations you find in your data - and the more data you have, the more (completely random) correlations you are going to find! - is useless.
They claim to have found evidence that "Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later."
The article goes on to say: "more evidence that a strong early education is a huge factor in helping children escape poverty."
How did they make that leap? Where's the evidence suggesting that "strong early education" is directly correlated with math and reading ability at age 7?
I don't believe this study proves anything. [...] I will propose that social skills have a much higher correlation to financial success than intelligence OR the "socioeconomic status" of one's parents.
That would be a neat Ph.D. thesis topic! But first you need a way to quantitatively measure social skills, before being able to test its correlation or covariance.
Also, you can't use a personal anecdote (sample size = 1) to disprove a statistical study of large magnitude (sample size = 17,000). There were probably a couple geniuses who became criminals, went to jail, and had very low income as a result. And a couple idiots who became reality TV stars and made a lot. But these do not disprove the general trend.
I don't know what kind of childhood you had, but for me at age 7, there was plenty of competition from peers. Who could run the fastest, bike the fastest, beat super mario brothers without warps, who could climb trees the fastest, who had the most friends etc.
Does that mean that ability in math and reading at an early age is separated from intelligence or at least you are able to be successful at it early (and do well as an adult) without being intelligent? What exactly is intelligence anyways? Apparently it isn't anything to do with the types of problems that might be difficult for people from different cultures/disadvantaged socially so that rules out the typical word games in IQ tests. It seems that math and reading skills aren't very strongly correlated with intelligence either. So how exactly do we determine someone is intelligent without using math or language?
I wonder how much of things are just relative. I was very gifted in science as a kid but as an adult only slightly above average as a university science grad. Part of it is selection I guess: people good at math and science tend to select themselves into the physics program. But still I wouldn't consider myself as exceptional now as I was when I was 12 doing relativity problems.
Yes, but school districts focus on giving everyone a minimum level of competence, in order to break the Matthew Effect. This is because once you are above the threshold, you pose no risk to their test scores, accreditation, state funding, etc., and misguided programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have only exaggerated this focus. Spending on remedial education is way up -- tutors, coaching, extra support is available if you can't understand things. But if you understand the basics already, sit there and be bored like I was; there are no bonuses for you; funding for Gifted and Talented Education is not a priority in America.
Sweet motherfucking Jebus, can people not recognize sarcasm anymore? Apparently Poe's Law applies to left-wing crazy just as well as right-wing crazy.
I would have modded you up but you just had throw "leftists" in there which completely ruined your well reasoned post. This isn't a left vs right issue, it's a rich vs poor. The fact that you had to make this a stab at liberals conveys to me that either you are rich (which I doubt) or that you have fallen, either through ignorance or apathy, for the usual conservative arguing points that some day if you work hard enough then you just might be rich (which is demonstable untrue). If you think there is a liberal agenda to make 100k/yr persons be just as priveledged as billionaires then I might reverse my decision. I doubt you can though because this plan just doesn't exist as you noted in the final line of your post.
Makes sense. Unfortunately people draw conclusions that people with educated parents need less assistance. There's an entire place in my school where some get extra assistance, yet because my parents had graduate degrees it's assumed I need nothing extra (Phd/Masters). Now, no consideration is given to the fact that my father is dead.
Now, the truth is I don't need the help, but I'm sure there are people with the same parental credentials who do. I think assistance should be provided by aptitude, not by the fact that my parents had 20+ years of higher education combined.
And even at that, for most values of x (IQ tests, number of neurons), x is not constant.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You are fundamentally incorrect in your statement "The problem is that leftists have convinced the culture that the lifestyle of a $100k/year salary is just as 'privileged' as someone with 50million in the bank"
I don't mean you are wrong as wrong would imply an error in fact ..... I do mean that you are fundamentally incorrect because your bias has dragged you so far from fact you can't even be wrong.
You are absolutely right in principle: networking (business-speak for "talking to people") is highly advantageous at all stages of one's career, nearly irrespective of field.
I'd clarify, though, that social skills are learnable to a large degree rather than exclusively an innate trait. I've found that those who stubbornly refuse to accept social skills as a valuable indicator of 'fitness' for employment/advancement are simply arrogant, immature, and/or suffer from a delusion of geek grandeur. Some of these people will go on to be extremely successful; others are content to wallow in envy and self-effacement. A key differentiating point is the time which the former group recognized accepted that relationships are necessary to accomplish something of value and put their effort into learning how to establishing those relationships.
There is no shortage of CEO's, actors, prominent scientists, or what-have-you, that describe their intense shyness and their efforts to overcome the detrimental effects to their career.
If you couldn't figure out a better use for your time than being bored, were you really that smart? I worked math problems when classes got slow, a friend of mine drew cartoons.
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Smart plus polite can equal bored. I chose not to pull out a textbook from another class or a personal reading book when the lectures went slow; it would have been called rude where I grew up. And I don't have an aptitude or interest in drawing. Thank you for the suggestions, though.
I agree with this completely. I have been called smart by lots of my friends. I graduated with second highest honors. I have an associates (I know not a bachelor, but it is college education). I'm at a dead end job. I am terrible at selling myself. Now I'm not a genius and don't expect to make billians, but I had a hard time making it to were I am. Take my fiance on the other hand. She is good at selling herself and has been getting raise after raise. She is also smart, but I think a lot of it has to do with her selling herself. Others where she works don't get the same upward movement.
This is just my observation.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
It's actually children of rich parents get access to better resources and therefore develop better math and reading ability and therefore get a better socioeconomic status later on. That and having your rich parents get their former college buddies to give the kids a high paying job, regardless of abilities.
AccountKiller
Making large salaries is not a privilege, but quite a burden on time and health.. They are earned just like any other. The money's nice, but for anyone besides the multimillionaires, it's a lot of work. Instead of two 8 hr shifts in two crappy jobs, it's one 16hr shift at one crappy job, salaried so you're on it 24/7 until you retire, get fired for losing it to passive aggressive office politics, or die.
The problem is that leftists have convinced the culture that the lifestyle of a $100k/year salary is just as 'privileged' as someone with 50million in the bank.. The latter could retire at any time and live in luxury for life, the former can't.
Don't be ridiculous. No one has ever said that someone making 100k is as privileged as someone with 50 million.
What's most amazing is that your statement is completely 'leftist' right up until you attack leftists.
At least be consistent when you are ranting.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Dumb people tend not to stay rich for very long.
Tell it to George W.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
This outcome is because early successes build confidence and lower resistance to learning new things in our education systems. The discovery a strong correlation here is a symptom of our flawed education systems. I struggled massively as a child and after two hard-fought degrees, I have become a successful engineer. The correlation certainly isn't a law.
I was hanging out with a high school buddy the other day. We're both geeks, I went into getting an IT degree and work in web dev/sysadmin and many others, he went to a game design school and does freelance graphic design. Both of us are, economically, losers. We were talking about a buddy we knew who we nicknamed "the black Johnny Bravo." Grade-A doofus but a smooth talker with a handsome face and a winning smile. He's a real estate agent and just bought a new Mercedes. All from middle-class families, except maybe mine which is middle class *at best.*
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel