Sunday, June 5, 2022
Are Video Games Harmful or Will They Make Your Kids Very Intelligent?
There was a big debate about this in 2009. See here. Computer games were generally found to be beneficial
The debate about whether or not screen time is harmful has been around for years. Some people believe that screen time, especially for children, is bad because it stunts their development and impairs their ability to think creatively.
Others claim that screen time can actually have positive effects. A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides some evidence for the latter claim.
Researchers at Karolinska University in Sweden studied how screen time relates to intelligence. The study produced some interesting results about the effects of various screen activities on intelligence.
The study looked at thousands of US children
In the study, conducted over a two-year period, the IQ scores of a group of children aged 8–10 years were followed.
The study examined the cognitive abilities of more than 9,000 boys and girls. In the beginning, the children completed a series of tests to measure their intelligence. The tests included measures of memory, attention and problem-solving skills.
Parents were also asked how much time their child spends watching TV and videos, playing video games and using social media.
The researchers studied 5,000 of the children again after 2 years. They asked the children to repeat the psychological tests to examine how their performance changed from one testing session to another.
The researchers also controlled for individual differences in the first test, such as genetic differences that might affect intelligence and differences that might be related to parents’ education level and income. This gave them a more accurate picture of how different factors influence intelligence.
Playing video games is better than watching TV
The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by about 2.5 IQ points between the two measurements.
No significant positive or negative effect of TV -watching or social media was found. These results suggest that not all activities are equal in terms of screen time.
Playing video games appears to have a positive effect on intelligence, while time spent on social media doesn’t appear to have a significant effect.
This study provides valuable insight into how different screen activities affect children’s intellectual development.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, spending time staring at screens doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on children’s cognitive abilities, as this recent study shows.
In fact, the study found that playing video games can boost intelligence.
The researchers haven’t yet examined how screen time affects other factors, such as physical activity or school performance.
We didn’t examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
However, these findings are consistent with several experimental studies on video game playing, which suggest that this activity can improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills, and more.
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Wednesday, May 4, 2022
‘I make men take an IQ test – if they don’t pass, I ditch them’
As a Mensa member who once married a very pleasant fellow Mensa member, I think I am in a good position to comment on this report. And the first thing that surprises me is that she needs test results to gauge IQ.
My Mensa wife
I have had relationships with many women over the years and I know very soon after having met one whether she is bright enough. I ask her if she has a favourite piece of music by J.S. Bach. If she is completely flummoxed by that question, I know she is very unlikely to be satisfactory to me.
Mind you, if she says she prefers the music of Palestrina that answer is even better.
Having a bright partner can have some problems, however. Zoe, my present girlfriend, is clearly very bright. And it means that I cannot ever put one over her for long. I never lie to women but I do not always give all the information I could. That does not wash with Zoe. She draws correct conclusions about me amazingly quickly
An interesting footmote: High IQ people tend to be better looking as well as bright. Candice Kloss is an example of that. Zoe is too.
New Yorker Candice Kloss – who hit the headlines last year after revealing men find her intelligence “intimidating” – has shared the extreme lengths she is willing to go to in order to find “Mr Right”, The Sun reports.
She gives prospective partners a written IQ test to take on their first date.
The model, who has 109,000 followers on Instagram, doesn’t want to “waste her time” with “idiots”.
“I want to make sure that it’s worth it to go on a second date with them,” Candice, who has been a member of Mensa since she was 17, told Jam Press.
“There are a lot of men that are attractive but if they aren’t intelligent it takes away from good looks. “How can you enjoy time with someone if you can’t connect over conversation?”
Those who pass will still have to stay on their A-game, as the model expects them to stay up-to-date on current affairs and be able to entertain her with their knowledge of maths, finance and science.
“Some people don’t care to keep up with current events, which can be a turn-off,” she said. “It’s attractive if someone picks up on things quickly, as well as emotional intelligence and a quick wit.
“Behavioural economics is my favourite topic, but it’s a lot of fun to hear anyone talk about something they’re experienced [with] and enthusiastic about.
“Growing up, I was a huge science and math nerd and still love maths.”
The college dropout is nearly considered a “genius” by Mensa standards.
According to the IQ scale, a score of 120-140 is classed as “very superior intelligence” – whereas anything over 140 is considered a “genius”.
Candice falls just short of the latter, at 136, and is in the top 2 per cent of the population for intelligence.
So, what IQ number do men need to date her?
“They need to be above average on the scale,” she said. “You don’t have to be a math whiz but you should be able to hold a conversation and be exceptionally smart in at least one subject.
“I’m attracted to intelligent (book-smart but also street-smart) men who have a good sense of humour, and are adventurous, straightforward and fun.”
Candice is often “underestimated” by men who assume she’s stupid because of her looks and modelling career.
But, she says it doesn’t bother her – in fact, she uses it to her advantage. “It’s better to be underestimated at first – I love to prove men wrong,” she previously told Jam Press.
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Sunday, March 6, 2022
Is your social class holding you back in your career?
It can do but it is not destiny. Let me give an example and then explain it:
Britain is probably the most class-ridden society in the Western world. Yet when I spent a year there in 1977 as a mere Australian of humble background, I had great social entree. For instance:
* I acquired a girlfiend of aristocratic lineage. She traced her ancestry back a thousand years.
* And I was told I could be nominated to one of London's prestigious gentleman's clubs.
* I got to have a chat to Margaret Thatcher at a small private garden party in Kent
So how did I do it? How did a mere Australian have the social acceptance that many an Englishman would have given his right arm for?
The first part to note is that I did not seek such acceptance. That would have been self-defeating. I just acted as myself. So what is there in me that opened so many doors in the "best" circles of England?
Charles Murray answered that a couple of decades ago in his notorious book and Toby Young has expanded it. Obnoxious though it may sound, there is a strong correlation in most societies between social status and IQ. The habits, attitudes and practices that characterize high status people are the habits, attitudes and practices of high IQ people. High IQ people set upper class standards. And they are often rather subtle and very hard to fake. You have got it or you do not. I did.
So, No. Your social status will not hold you back. But your IQ might. As long as you are reasonably socially competent. most doors will open to very bright people
The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace has been well established. But one factor of identity has largely been left out: socio-economic class.
Research has shown that moving up the socio-economic ladder is becoming more difficult, and class bias has been known to affect lifetime earnings. Studies on first-generation college students also suggest disparities may follow them into their post-college careers.
Few studies have investigated the workplace experience of those from different socio-economic backgrounds. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a study of first-generation professionals, or FGPs. Also known as class migrants, FGPs are those who move from working-class roots to white-collar careers. We included FGPs and non-FGPs in the study to produce comparative data. Here’s what we learned about FGPs and what company leaders can do to support them.
FGPs were likelier than others to report that structured programs were helpful to their careers. For example, we asked each survey respondent how they obtained their first professional job and found 23.7 per cent of FGPs acquired their jobs through a work-study program at college, compared with just 7.6 per cent of non-FGPs.
Likewise, FGPs were almost twice as likely as non-FGPs to report they found employee resource groups helpful during their first job (23 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively). In contrast, non-FGPs indicated they were likelier to lean on family and friends for support and advice.
FGPs were also significantly likelier to report that professional development and leadership training was useful for their careers, contributed to promotions and improved their skills. “Code switching” means adapting one’s communication, appearance and mannerisms to fit in. It’s widely documented that people of colour feel pressured to act differently at work to be accepted. We found people from working-class backgrounds often feel similarly. Many FGPs also reported being shocked and disappointed that their hard work and results were notably less important to their careers than knowing how to communicate in a certain way and build networks. As one respondent explained: “At first I thought, oh … just as long as I’m a great worker, right? You know, I do what I need to do, I’ll get promoted fast. That’s not the case. What it really is, is your contacts. Building that network.”
In our survey, considerable differences arose between FGPs and non-FGPs when participants were asked directly about how they felt in the workplace. They were asked to rank several statements on a five-point scale. FGPs rated almost every statement lower than non-FGPs, including: “My personality type is valued,” “I have access to decision-makers,” “I feel comfortable talking about my family and personal life”. This tells us overall feelings of inclusion and belonging are likely lower for FGPs.
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Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Growing up poor affects your BRAIN: Children in low-income households show slower activity in key neural regions linked to thinking and learning, study reveals
This study of cognitive development in neonates is interesting but its generalizability is low. We know that IQ measured in young children shows negligible correlation with IQ in adulthood, for instance. And the lesson from HeadStart is that early improvements fade over time
Children who grow up in poorer households show slower activity in key brain regions linked to both thinking and learning, a study has warned.
Experts from Columbia University found that the brain development of infants in low-income families varied with the amount of financial support they were given.
Scans at age one showed faster brain activity in kids whose families were given $333 (£250) of support monthly compared to those given only $20 (£15) per month.
It is unclear if the differences in brain activity will persist as the children age, or how they might influence cognitive and behavioural growth.
However, in older children, activity in the regions in question has previously been linked to the development of learning skills.
The researchers are now investigating how the payments benefited the children, with possibilities including facilitating better nutrition, or relieving parental stress.
Either way, they said, the results suggest that interventions designed to reduce poverty could benefit infant brain development and improve later outcomes.
The investigation was undertaken by neuroscientist Kimberly Noble of New York's Columbia University and her colleagues.
'The brain changes speak to the remarkable malleability of the brain, especially early in childhood,' said Professor Noble.
'We have known for many years that growing up in poverty puts children at risk for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health.
'However, until now, we haven't been able to say whether poverty itself causes differences in child development, or whether growing up in poverty is simply associated with other factors that cause those differences.'
In the study, the researchers measured brain activity levels among a subset of 435 one-year-old children who were participating in the so-called 'Baby's First Years' trial.
This randomised controlled trial into the benefits of poverty reduction has seen 1,000 low-income mothers recruited from postpartum wards in four US metropolitan areas — New Orleans, New York City, Omaha, and Minneapolis–Saint Paul.
The mothers, who were primarily Black or Latina and not college educated, were then given a cash gift of either $333 (£250) or $20 (£15) per month to spend it whatever way they chose.
While these results come from one year into the interventions, the trial is still ongoing, and the mothers will continue to receive the monthly cash gifts until their children are four years and four months old.
Each child's brain activity was measured using an electroencephalography, or 'EEG', machine via an electrode-bearing cap that was placed on the child's head.
The researchers found that children whose mothers were given $333 per month had around 20 per cent more high-frequency brain activity than those whose parents were only given $20 of support monthly.
High-frequency brain activity in the frontal region has previously been linked to both the development of learning and thinking skills.
Professor Noble explained that children’s brains naturally adapt to their experiences. 'All healthy brains are shaped by their environments and experiences, and we are not saying that one group has "better" brains,' she said.
'But — because of the randomized design — we know that the $333 per month must have changed children's experiences or environments, and that their brains adapted to those changed circumstances.'
'Families are all different, and the potential promise of money as a way of directly supporting families is that it allows parents to make choices about what their children most need,' said paper author Katherine Magnuson. 'Thus, there may not be just one way in which money positively affects families; —money may matter in a lot of small ways.
'We hear from the mothers in our study how challenging it is to raise children without enough money. 'A few hundred dollars a month has the potential to do a lot of good for these families, and we are grateful that we will continue to learn from them about how the money has helped them meet their goals.'
'Global evidence is thin on how children are affected by cash transfers, especially with respect to very young children,' said fellow paper author and applied economist Lisa Gennetian of North Carolina's Duke University.
'This is mostly because it is so hard and expensive to objectively capture children's development. This study's findings on infant brain activity are unprecedented.'
The outcomes seen, she added, 'really speak to how anti-poverty policies — including the types of expanded child tax credits being debated in the US — can and should be viewed as investments in children.'
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Monday, November 22, 2021
IQ and autism
There is an interesting video about IQ by Edward Dutton below. Ignore his manic introduction. I have noted his work before. His interest in IQ has, regrettably, made him something of an outcast in academe. Last I heard he was teaching at a university in sub-arctic Finland, which is a long way from his origins in Northern England.
In the video below he presents the Baron-Cohen theory of an association between autism and a very high IQ. He does not define the high IQ group precisely but he includes Mensa members in his coverage so he is apparently discussing people in the top 2% of IQ and perhaps some a bit lower than that. Since I am a former Mensa member and organizer, I am inclined to see him as talking inter alia about me.
And I do fit his major claim about high IQ: That high IQ is associated with autism. I am clearly a high-functioning autistic. I have outlined the evidence for that elsewhere. And many of the things that he says of high IQ people are indeed recognizable in me and by me. So I think there is considerable truth in his generalizations.
There are however some problems with his presentation. The largest problem is that there are a wide range of autistic behaviours, Some people are severely disabled by it and some, like myself, suffer only mild limitations. And not all autistics are highly intelligent, though they do often have some unusual "gift" in some way. My gift is to do even the hardest adademic tasks at lightning speed. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in 6 weeks, among other things.
Another problem is of the chicken and egg variety. Does autism cause high IQ or does high IQ cause autism? Dutton seems to think that what makes you highly intelligent also makes you autistic. Maybe -- but there are surely SOME high IQ people who are not autistic. That is obviously a testable proposition but I am not aware of anyone who has tested it
There is some obvious truth in it however. A high IQ person does see the world very differently from Joe Average and that must create social difficulties. And social difficulties are the hallmark of autism. My own social skills are certainly not the best but I have had a rather nice time with the ladies over the years so they cannot be too bad. Many good memories.
So I think Dutton is right in seeing autism as the characteristic ailment of high IQ people but I strongly doubt that all highly intelligent people are autistic. Dutton does tend to overgeneralize.
There is however a research literature in support of his ideas
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.00300/full
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13609-006
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Friday, February 12, 2021
The Decline of Intelligence in the West
The article below by Canadian essayist David Solway is a dazzling display of cultural awareness but lacks sober consideration of any of the issues he addresses. So let me fill in some of the gaps.
Why the decline in average IQ? There does seem to be such a decline but it is no mystery. For around 50 years, effective contraception has enabled women to enjoy sex and male company generally without childbirth resulting. So many women have opted out of childbearing. And, sadly, highly intelligent women are more likely to do that. And that means that they do not pass on their genes for intelligence. So present-day mothers have a lower average IQ. And that can only mean a population with a lower average IQ.
So what are the implications of a population with a lower IQ? We do of course already have some such populations: Africans and Arabs, for instance. And both those have created societies where it is not inviting to live. But such societies have many differences from ours so the dysfunction could be due to other factors than IQ.
A much more hopeful observation is that all societies are only superficially democratic. It is the <a href="http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm">smart fraction</a> that rules the roost. So Israel is run by the Ashkenazim, Brazil and Mexico are run by whites and the 7% of Britons who get a private school education run almost everything in that country. And such elites trend to be self-perpetuating. Private school boys tend to marry the sisters of their classmates and black/white marriages are rather rare. And Sephardi/Ashkenazi marriages are the exception rather than the rule.
So what will happen is that as long as the smart fraction intermarry, their societies will tend to be run much as before. A large dumb majority will not matter much
But one needs to be cautious in attributing everything to IQ. There are other influences which have produced the dumb behaviour that Solway documents. An obvious one is the decline in American education. American education is now decisively in the hands of the Left and producing well-informed citizens does not seem to be one of their priorities. They want to produce "woke" people above all. And being woke is rather inimical to real knowledge.
And woke attitudes are now society-wide, with few on the Left being immune to them. Most conservatives have no time for wokery but they too sometimes make obeisances to it for the sake of peace. So the deterioration in the national discourse can largely be traced to the ideological needs of the Left</i>
Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, "A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia."
Horowitz argues that the plummet in cognitive abilities "could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also. fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future." Flynn himself, who did the original research on the eponymous effect, has stated that "The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered." Flynn's more optimistic Are We Getting Smarter: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2012; his subsequent findings led in an opposite direction.*
The brainchild of French psychologist Alfred Binet, the IQ construct is a controversial issue with many different interpretations and applications. Charles Spearman proposed the variable notion of a g factor, or general intelligence measure, responsible for overall performance on various mental ability tests such as memory retention, spatial processing, and quantitative reasoning. The g factor has been compared to general athletic ability which allows a person to excel in different fields and activities. There has been vigorous debate over the strict equivalency between IQ scores and intelligence, but there is broad agreement on a general waning of intelligence or, from a clinical perspective, an ebbing of IQ scores. Of course, smart people can sometimes do poorly on IQ tests and obtuse people can sometimes rank high on aspectual tiers of these tests. But the consensus appears to be that the correlation approximately holds while allowing for scalene anomalies. In effect, the g factor is eroding.
One recalls MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, who referred to "the stupidity of the American voter" as helping him to pass the controversial law. One wonders if Gruber ever heard of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's test results purporting to show that "the rot starts at the top." This would implicate Gruber and his cohort in the experience of what Piaget calls horizontal d‚calage, which stymies the application of cognitive functions and logical operations to extended tasks. In other words, Gruber et al. are also stupid, gradually destroying the very society that enabled them to flourish. But the rot can also start at the bottom, as a combination of generalized mental vacancy and low-to-no-information voters furthers cultural and social degeneration. As Morris Berman remarks in The Twilight of American Culture, "A society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid."
Why should we be surprised that an American president should pronounce "corpsman" as "corpseman"? Or that a Canadian prime minister says "peoplekind" in lieu of "mankind"? Or that a Washington, D.C., mayor and his staff should have objected to a perfectly good word like "niggardly"? Or that a Methodist pastor and Congressman should follow the exclamation "Amen" with "a-woman," when an ordained minister should surely know that "Amen" is an acronym for the Hebrew ??? ?????? ??????? (El melech neeman: "Lord and faithful King")-or, as some scholars think, a calque for the Aramaic "so be it"? One can multiply these gaffes, misnomers, and malapropisms indefinitely among those who should know better-and that is merely scratching the surface. The dumbing down phenomenon is virtually encyclopedic in heft and extent.
One sees the same intelligence deficit in the names chosen for some of our major social media networks. "YouTube" is cringe-worthy-just say it dispassionately to yourself. "Facebook" is a ridiculous moniker, as well as a dubious platform: as Niall Ferguson quips in The Great Degeneration, Facebook is "a vast tool enabling like-minded people to exchange like-minded opinions about, well, what they like." Then there's "Twitter." A conversation between human beings is compared to birds twittering on a digital branch-the implicit message is that communicants are bird-brained. (Contrast to such infelicity a beleaguered platform like "Parler" with its French connotation of real speech and an analogy to a living room where people gather to converse amicably and share ideas.) The Apple logo-an apple with a bite taken out of it-is the fruit of pure bathos and corporate stupidity, inadvertently reminding us of the primal sin in the Garden of Eden and warning us about the perilous quest for knowledge that tantalizes on another digital tree. "Think different" is thus contra-indicated, an original sin. Apple, seriously?
Top or bottom doesn't seem to matter. In his spy thriller Early Warning, Michael Walsh comments about government officials who, presumably "the best minds of the Republic," are merely a "collection of hacks, time-servers, and affirmative-action appointees" whose advancement depends heavily on nepotism. "It was really pathetic, when you thought about it: that more than two centuries of American history had come to this." Believe it. An American congressman fears the island of Guam will capsize. So-called "ambush journalist" Jesse Watters in Watters World interviews young university students; the level of ignorance, functional illiteracy, and smug self-esteem he uncovers is enough to turn the specter of our cultural practices, general knowledge, and university system into a cosmic joke.
And so it goes. A London community activist, asked about removing a Churchill statue during the summer of BLM love, admits she hasn't "personally met" Winston Churchill. A swarm of Twitter users condemns Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Tom Brady as "racist" for defeating half-black Kansas City Chiefs' QB Patrick Mahomes on Super Bowl LV during Black History Month-the fact that the great majority of Brady's teammates are black and are clearly Brady enthusiasts seems to have escaped their attention. Major economic and energy policies seem planned not by cerebral giants but by weed-addled pubescents. Bill Gates, for example, wants to pepper the sky with aerosols to reflect sunlight out of the atmosphere and initiate global cooling-the risks are incommensurable and likely irreversible. Gates has what we might call "sector-intelligence" and might do well on segments of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, but I wouldn't bet on his g score. The travesty of intelligence, prudence, and wisdom is beyond calculation, and it is only getting worse as IQ continues to slip down the great chain of thinking. This is the world that the classic film Idiocracy extravagantly punctures.
Why this should be is anybody's guess. No one really knows. Various theories have been proposed to account for accelerating neural descent, ranging from the Dewey-inspired "progressive education" agenda working its leveling passage from the turn of the 20th century to the decrepit public schools and failed universities of the present day; to the softening effect of prolonged affluence and ease on a culture; to the debilitating influence of "smart" technology that performs our cognitive functions for us; to the assumption that women of higher intelligence are having fewer children, implying that women of lower intelligence are driving population growth; to the effects of increased media exposure and the consequent lessening of reading; to the emergence of the vices of envy and resentment owing to radical egalitarianism and the rancor of the under-performing against the skilled, hard-working, and successful, a dynamic cogently analyzed by Dinesh D'Souza in Stealing America; or to the merely inescapable fact of decay: as Robert Frost wrote, "Nothing gold can stay." One thinks, too, of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' remark in his Journal: "From much, much more; from little, not much; and from nothing, nothing." Whatever the cause or causes may be, intellectual deterioration seems to be the case.
What, then, is to be done? We need to go to literature to contemplate possibilities for restoration. The problem, says Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams, is that "The good minds still do not find each other often enough." In his reflections on culture In Bluebeard's Castle, George Steiner imagined a future of small, eremitic clusters of intellectual light dotting an arid landscape, recycling Max Weber's notion of frail enclaves of enlightenment as the last resort of a civilization sinking into darkness. Walter M. Miller Jr.'s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz portrayed an obscure abbey in the Utah desert where historical knowledge is kept alive and preserved from the "Simpletons," even if it's only a sacred shopping list or a mysterious blueprint for circuit design. "Let us change the icons," wrote Will Durant in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, "and light the candles."
Berman calls this the "monastic option," but he does not regard it as an assembly of cenobites residing in a physical plant somewhere in the outback. Instead, it consists of a disparate collection of individuals, "cultural nomads," who may not know one another but are dedicated to a life of private decency, "the disinterested pursuit of truth, the cultivation of art [and] the commitment to critical thinking." The "new monks" derive from and support "traditions of craftsmanship, care, and integrity, preservation of canons of scholarship, critical thinking, individual achievements and independent thought." Their purpose is "to transmit a memory trace of what a culture can be about."
It's a daunting task. The number of people incapable of lucid argument and civil debate, whether Internet trolls, social media vulgarians, angry progressivists, media ignoramuses and intellectually challenged political leaders, is legion. It is therefore by no means astonishing that the greatest civilization the world has ever known, the Judeo-Christian West, is subsiding into a state of cognitive expiry, prone to fantasies and delusions, unable to confront and parse the reality of the world, oblivious to the symbiosis of man, history and nature, distracted by pseudo-scientific baubles, bereft of spiritual substance, and foreign to the very idea of truth.
In Social and Cultural Dynamics, Pitirim Sorokin, one of the great thinkers of our time, distinguished between "ideational" cultures, which are knowledge-and-spiritually focused, and "sensate" cultures, which are primarily informational and materialistic, the latter eventually devolving into a condition in which coercion, fraud, debasement of the creative impulse, family breakdown, and the encroachment of "untruth" into the human conscience (read: political correctness, fake news, electoral debauchery) are paramount. The latter is our present cultural home, lacking reflective capacity and experiencing a downtrend in clarity of thought and general percipience, shaving off IQ points as clarity and percipience drop. The concept of intelligence is complex and multifactorial, but if by "intelligence" we mean something like the ability to see the world as it is, to understand context, and to act in ways proven to be beneficial over time, then, according to Sorokin, intelligence is likely to decline in the latter stages of a "sensate" age.
The decline of intelligence-moral rectitude and creative exuberance are collateral casualties-is now in full throttle. The exceptions to the debacle-monks, nomads, people of integrity, people capable of common sense, the classically educated-represent the only viable hope for a new "ideational" age to arise out of the rubble of a "sensate" disaster. It may take another century to bring about what Sorokin called "the turn," the slow ascent up the IQ ladder, which is cold comfort indeed. But I suspect it's the only real comfort we have
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Closing Australia’s education divide will take a generation, landmark study finds
More pretence that all students have equal potential. The "divide" is the poor achievements of Aboriginal and working class children. In the USA the "gap" is between black and white pupils. And huge efforts and many bright-eyed ideas have been used to close that gap -- to no effect. So it would be optimistic indeed to think that things might be different in Australia
They are not. All sorts of efforts have been made to improve Aboriginal education but just getting Aboriginal children to attend school is a major difficulty. School is just not attractive to them and the parents don't care
And the basic thing underlying the gap is the same in the USA and Australia: the difference in Average IQ. IQ is highly correlated with educational success and both Aborigines and American blacks score abysmally on it. There is simply no way out of that situation
One of the most comprehensive studies of Australia's education system has found postcodes and family backgrounds impact the opportunities available to students from pre-school to adulthood, with one in three disadvantaged students falling through the cracks.
Sergio Macklin, the deputy lead of education policy at Victoria University's Michell Institute, released the report Educational Opportunity in Australia, which calls for immediate extra resources to help disadvantaged, Indigenous and remote students.
"Educational success is strongly linked to the wealth of a young person's family and where they grow up," Mr Macklin said.
"I think Australia's really letting down students from low-income families, Aboriginal students and those in remote areas."
The report critiques progress on last December's Alice Springs Education Council meeting where, in the wake of Australia's poor performance against its international counterparts, education ministers pledged to deliver a system that produced excellence and equity.
Last year's poor results on equality of education have now been exacerbated by remote learning, with some students without internet or stability at home falling weeks behind their peers.
"The children and young people that were being worst served by the education system are probably the ones that are being most affected by it," Mr Macklin said.
"So you'll see employment stress in families dramatically increased student vulnerability."
The report followed the progress of more than 300,000 students from school entry through primary school, into high school and onto early adulthood.
Mr Macklin believes the problem will take a generation to fix.
The report found disadvantaged students were more than twice as likely as their peers to not be in study or work by the age of 24.
The national average of students missing out on either work or study is 15 per cent, but this rises to 32 per cent of students from the lowest SES backgrounds, 38 per cent from very remote areas and 45 per cent among Indigenous young people.
"I think what this report highlights is that we're losing young people's opportunities in adulthood — and that's a real problem for young people," Mr Macklin said.
"But it's also a real problem for Australia. It puts a handbrake on our recovery efforts from the COVID recession."
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/closing-australia-e2-80-99s-education-divide-will-take-a-generation-landmark-study-finds/ar-BB1arPbh
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Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope