Corollary: the “dumbing” down of public school (elimination of gifted programs, delay of algebra, etc) has a permanent impact on our society’s IQ.

▲

kulahan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's inaccurate to call it a dumbing-down. It's more correct to label it as the largest stratification of education we've ever seen.

The smartest kids are smarter than ever before. They're absolutely rocking the house. The problem is that the "middle class has been gutted". Kids who were kinda smart, or kinda dumb, are now lumped in with kids who probably need Individual Education Plans (IEPs). This lowers the educational standard for almost all students - though of course the most well-off among us (educationally, rather than monetarily) are not only not suffering, they're thriving.

	▲	TexanFeller 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The smartest kids are smarter than ever before Only if they’re wealthy or get extremely lucky and live near a randomly good school. By many metrics I was the smartest in my class, but my family had little money and lived in a rural area with a single underfunded school. I spent my days in class with kids that were still struggling to sound out “cat” in third grade. A few times a week I got to spend an hour in “gifted” class but that was mostly art projects, nothing that would help make up for the rest of the day being wasted.
	▲	drivebyhooting 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		How are they rocking the house? The standard public Chinese education turns out better 90th percentile than our 99.9th percentile house rockers. How to confirm this? Talk to PIs and others hiring researchers. Home grown talent doesn’t even come close. It’s very upsetting.
	▲	Joel_Mckay 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>The smartest kids are smarter than ever before. That is provably incorrect, as since Victorian times people lost around 14 to 23 IQ points on average. Notably, the corrected scores have continued on a downward trend for the past century. People are not getting smarter, as recent events have shown. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMHfBobgLSI

▲

lo_zamoyski 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sadly, this may be coming to NYC. In principle, I am all for trying to improve the baseline, but you cannot sacrifice better students to do that. Not only is it silly (how would this sacrifice exactly benefit worse students?), but unjust. Furthermore, education begins at home. Parents are the primary educators of children, not necessarily academically, but in the broader "life" sense. If the home environment is not conducive or supportive of education at school, you will be facing a very uphill battle.

The dumbing down of education goes further than what you note, though. Think of classical education and the formation of the human person (I'm not talking about "Dead Poets Society" ersatz, but the real deal). Think of the principles behind the trivium and quadrivium. In the best case, we are producing superficially technically savvy barbarians. Schools are effectively savage factories, and universities are laughable and should be ashamed of calling themselves universities.