As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
People want easy solutions, like "Have more people be born smart" instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like "Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population"
There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this ... so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.
So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women's rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.
Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative American had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.
Using former Nazis wasn't because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It's quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.
As a complete side note: I believe it's been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn't believe in the cause. I'm not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.
Nuke and atomic technology was one thing ... and the Americans basically had that in their pocket regardless if they had Nazi scientists or not
The big leap that the Americans made with Nazi scientists was to pair atomic technology with ballistic missile technology.
When you just have a bomb and you need a big slow moving aircraft to deliver the bomb, then it is almost useless as there are plenty of ways to take down a jet in mid flight before it even reaches a target.
The unholy match that humanity came up with was to pair nuclear weapons with missile technology ... which created a weapon that is nearly unstoppable and completely dangerous for all of humanity.
Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It's only gonna get worse, isn't it?
Well, reading and writing is a 6 millenia old technology, thus it's in dire need of replacement with AI readers /s
For us foreigners, 6th grade is around 10 / 11 years old?
Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.
Yep. God help us.
A little older. I was 11 in grade 6, but I was also the youngest student.
OK well honestly I feel like that's less awful. I'm assuming the measuring stick is "decent 12 year old reading level" which is not bad. Like it's easily "read a novel" good but obviously you're not going to be chowing down some Dickens or whatever.
I'm curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching....
I saw that "3min read" tag on the screenshot and thought, "Not for 54% of American adults."
Yep, going to report this. It's not a meme .. it is actually fact and documentation for our eventual Idiocracy future.
Just kidding about the report of course.
Op would be very upset if he could read this.
In case you were wondering why we're losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
Yeah we elected one in to the presidential office too
Yeah, we’ve noticed. Not that Europe is far behind I fear.
Literacy is definitely declining; people just don’t have the attention spans they used to. Between Twitter, TikTok and other brain rot, reading a book or simply a longer text just isn’t something a lot of people do.
If you want some light horror reading, check out /r/teachers.
It took thirty years of cutting education spending but they are almost to a fully ignorant populace.
We've even hit the point where they don't have to pretend to be pro education
Which means 54% cannot write a competent book report hitting the major plots and themes.
Question what is considered 6th grade.
It means you can read and understand the instructions on a pack of ramen but can't pick up on nuances, infer bias or apply any kind of abstract reasoning to a piece of text
In high school, I always thought the kids sounding out words like "the" were just taking the piss and doing it on purpose. I see now that was genuine. 😔
How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Who is that sexy mother fucker in the picture?
you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
God, no. Even tabloids are generally written at an 8th grade+ level.
There's some mentioning of things going downwards here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age, like simple machines for the masses where the buttons are moving pictograms of what happens when that thing is pressed... Where on the other side, there's nanomachines built by the educated.
This ain't a meme, Pug
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is saddened
Not surprising h their president can hardly read
87.4% graduate high school, then people stop being forced to read books and those who never liked reading get out of practice
I genuinely do not understand why people do not like reading. Im not a super nerd and only read a few books a year but I look at the hours i spent reading those books as some of the best entertainment i've had all year.
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
