Remembering when one graduated high school, in the year 2000, looking around and wondering why we all still looked like adolescents. It felt weird. Remembered attending high school graduation for elder cousin’s, long before, and thinking they looked like soldiers, like men and women.
But accepted, it was probably ‘perspectival’ (a word which the built-in dictionary of this phone refuses to accept). One was merely incapable of seeing their own advanced physical form, due to some perpetual ‘nowness’, or reflection defection—just can’t see it in oneself.
But later one went and looked and compared high school graduation photos of people from the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, even 1990’s, and compared and contrasted. And though there were obviously people endowed with eternal youth, the average face in the photos kept getting younger (on average). By the time the 2000’s came, the average high school graduate appeared, physically, to be in the 8th grade (all things considered).
Society had slowly moved to infantile dimensions. Kids were being coddled to the point of non-advancement, though maybe not intellectually (in terms of academic laws of advancement). Something wasn’t adding up.
The average person graduating high school with a common core of capacities believes they have succeeded, but have they? If we keep lowering the bar? Not simply based on test performance, but actually intellectual integration with human life.
And then it hit. One was the first generation to become victims of the ‘standardized testing’ curriculum. We weren’t quite there yet as a society, but soon (and thinking of one’s niece and nephew’s generation) all of academic life revolves around testing—not only to gauge achievement—but also to acquire funding.
As we slip deeper into this model of education, where kids (and now adults) are believers (academic religionists) in their own advancement based on multiple choice answers to preconcieved and easily studied answers, are we not simply getting dumber?
We can’t know. Because we’re getting dumber. Smarter at tests, maybe. But dumber at life.
The grading used in Finland for basic education is a scale from 4-10, 4 is F, 10 is A.
Every 3 years there are standardised tests, to measure the skill and knowledge of students, I’ve also participated in these a few times when I was in school. When I was in school, having the average grade of 8, would now be a 10. When I finished school my grades were 8.2, so now I would have a 10.2, based on the standardised testing scores. This change has happened in roughly 20 years. For some reason, when students have become less capable, the solution has been to reduce the requirements for a certain grade. This difference is by the way even bigger when you go back 30 years.
There are also studies that indicate finnish IQs have dropped by 10-15 points since the 90s. I read about these studies over 10 years ago, and even back then the drop was around 10 points.
I think there is a link between intellect and physical development. I know for a fact, that teenagers are less developed physically now than 20, 30 or 40 years ago. This also affects their emotional capability, to actually feel emotions. I think that in general people are weaker, physically and figuratively thinner skinned. There are probably multiple factors that contribute to why this is, but it’s all speculation so not really worthwhile to voice.
One thinks you have a whole system now that tell people their primary contribution is to take pictures of themselves.
In all the technological advances one has seen, the primary change-over was social media. It’s a ‘me’ world, not a ‘we’ world.
But one hopes and prays that it is a blip on the screen. People will realize their mobiles are destroying society, and put them down.
We didn’t build this world, we inherited it. We woke up in a world totally designed for our welfare. And we take it for granted.
Hofstadter nailed it in 1963. What is worse is we doubled down. He wrote about anti-intellectualism as a cultural tendency. Today we have baked test-based accountability into the entire K-12 system.
The irony? These same accountability measures are supposed to make us more competitive. But they do not measure critical thinking, just test-taking. Kids learn to game the test, not to think.
That is why the OP is right. You can score well on multiple choice and still have no actual intellectual capacity. The system rewards compliance over understanding.
One thinks Americans were doers—we do stuff. That was the model. We don’t just sit around and think. Europeans did that, which made them poorer.
However, even the original model has become depleted. People neither do, nor think. We wait for immigrants to do things for us, then we complain about immigrants.
Now we have a disconnect. We think ourselves into some ideological compliance, then we do nothing. Left or right.
But it is making us dumber, even high logic and high learning. Then we expect everything to be done for us.
This is interesting. Hofstadter would agree - anti-intellectualism isn’t just about not valuing ideas, it’s about performance. The performative aspect is what’s killing us.
I think the immigrant point cuts deeper though. We want the work without the people. Want their labor but resent their presence. That’s not just hypocrisy - it’s a fundamental refusal to engage with reality as it is.
We’ve outsourced both thinking and doing. Outsource thinking to algorithms, outsourcing doing to others. Then wonder why we’re hollow.
On the flip side - maybe there’s something to building things with your hands, even if it’s not work in the capitalist sense. Indie web, open source, making tools - that’s both thinking and doing at the same time.
What would restoring that look like?