sotonye.substack.com
SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.
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Fully agree. In addition, many people somehow graduate school whilst being 'functionally illiterate'. This suggests that they're a massive waste of time, failing their supposed goals.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
I've heard people argue that clearly the sixth-grade level of literacy is too high or that it's an unrealistic standard - but then what is the point of the seventh grade? What is the point of teaching people Shakespeare if they can't understand it? I think Shakespeare was a huge waste of time, yet I can appreciate parts of it, there's some interesting wordplay.
20% are functionally illiterate. I suppose this includes a great many people who don't know English at all since they weren't born in an English speaking country. Even so, this is pretty bad. I've seen too many videos of Americans being asked basic questions and knowing nothing. For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g2oMv93EUpY or https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmcubp2szg or https://youtube.com/watch?v=wu7RXlIEbog
Eagle eyed viewers may notice that white men are not prominent in these clips, there's obviously a cherrypicking process where the people who answer correctly aren't included. Hbd is clearly a factor here. But still, I would've thought it would've thought stuff like 'what country did the US gain independence from' would be universally known in the US. It should be all but impossible for our youtuber to find a native English speaker who doesn't know what country the US got its independence from.
(As an aside, ChatGPT has human intelligence - there's no doubt about it. Issues with anagrams and making funny jokes pale in comparison with the gaping stupidity and categorical ignorance 'Asia is a country' of many Americans.)
There ought to be a slash-and-burn approach to education. It's not just America, other parts of the Anglosphere are deteriorating in a similar fashion. In the immortal words of Donald Trump, we need to shut everything down until we know what is going on.
For a more scientific look at what elementary knowledge Americans posses, broken down by race and sex, see this survey by Pew. @starless_sea
Example from the study: 78% of men and 59% of women know that oil, natural gas and coal are examples of fossil fuels. If the YouTube videos above reflected this, they would have twice as many stupid answers from women than from men. They have about x3 as many women as men (quick check, it seems like more since the women gets more air time). But the disparity would increase as the questions gets easier, and the questions do seem easier than this, so maybe they do reflect a fair sample. I still think these kind of YouTube videos are full of bias and make bad models unless they seem really trustworthy in their methodology (which the linked ones don't).
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