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.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.
Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It's only gonna get worse, isn't it?
By design. Learndt particular individuals tend not to vote for Nazis.
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.
I'm curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching....
Update:
Right, it's better but not wildly so when spread across the EU and lower in some places. This page is from the Irish Central Statistics office with 2023 numbers and puts us at 21% at or below the level 1 (at or below a grade 6 equivalent). On that page (2023 numbers) the US is at 28% so that 54% statistic in the OP smells a bit.
The main difference between Ireland and the US is that we're only 5% below level 1 where the US is at 12%.
For reference, Portugal has 15% below level 1.
Here's the definition of level 1:
Here's the relevant graph with all levels in picture format but you can get the individual numbers by going to the page and hovering over the individual levels.
Japan and the Nordics crushing it to nobody's surprise.
Well, reading and writing is a 6 millenia old technology, thus it's in dire need of replacement with AI readers /s
In case you were wondering why we're losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
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.
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
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.
Yeah we elected one in to the presidential office too
Which means 54% cannot write a competent book report hitting the major plots and themes.
If you want some light horror reading, check out /r/teachers.
Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
Around 12 years old or so. I've been hearing something similar to this my whole life. I didn't understand how true it was until I started recruiting in 2009.
Not that it started with Bush, but after 'No Child Left Behind' act schools were incentivized so pass all students. They tied school funding to graduation rates and passing students. Teachers taught more just to the test and not comprehending the material.
I'm sure it's gotten worse COVID.
In my high school they were passing people who were functionally illiterate to keep funding up. It was pretty much assumed those kids were a lost cause so they never got any extra help either. School would just look the other way as someone was lost in the cracks and passed on paper. The very rare ones that did manage to get extra help would take tests in a different room and it was well known the aids would just give them answers if they took too long. Everyone hated it especially the kids being passed through. They got ostracized for "having it easy" while also being frustrated they're spending all day being told to focus on stuff they don't understand and aren't getting real help with
I think 6th grade is reading for plot. Just a basic plot with a few characters. No complex themes. No unreliable narrators. Limited vocabulary.
I found an online test for it somewhere and it was like
"Sally was born in Canada and lived there until she moved to the United States when she was thirteen. She spends summers in Canada with her aunt and uncle, but spends the rest of the year in Boston. This year, she's graduating from high school and planning on attending college. She wants to see more of the country, so her top picks for college are in California and Chicago."
"Where does Sally live during the winter?"
"Where did Sally spend her childhood?"
"Where do Sally's aunt and uncle live?"
You're not going to find as many people who read badly on a majority text platform like this.
Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.
Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary "literacy" methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there's a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.
This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.
About 11-12 years old. Educational standards should be a base understanding of simple novels and ability to write a basic page or two length essay on it. Math skills should be late arithmetic or early algebra. Or at least that's what I remember from the time.
Not great. Sixth graders would be the 11-12 year old kids. It's been a while since I was in school(I'm 38) and when I was in sixth grade I was considered "advanced" in reading level due to reading Tolkien.
There are various rating systems, but it boils down to comprehension. 6th grade reading level is about the level to be able to follow the plot of Harry Potter.
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. 😔
To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.
What a timeline America is going through.
87.4% graduate high school, then people stop being forced to read books and those who never liked reading get out of practice
That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
In healthcare, all of our education material for patients is at a 5th grade level.
Not surprising h their president can hardly read
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