The Lobotomy Factories

CBS reports:

It’s an education bombshell.Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

In my TEDx talk, I discussed the decline in our educational system. I said:

[Our textbooks have been dumbed down. The average 8^th grader is now reading from text books at the 5^th grade reading level. The literature text required in 12th grade English classes is nowadays simpler than the average 8th grade reader published before World War II... 

There was  a 50 point drop in Mean Verbal SAT scores between 1962 and 1979.... There has been another 10 point drop since 2000, when internet access went mainstream...

The number of US adults capable of reading at the 10^th grade level or above dropped from 54% in 1949 to 20% in 2003. The number capable of reading at even the 6^th grade level dropped from 83% in 1949 to 52% in 2003. In other words, more Americans could read at the 10^th grade level in 1949 than can read at the 6^th grade level today.

This is despite the fact that in 1949 the average adult had only 8.5 years of education, while in 2003 the average adult had 12.5 years of education. Four and a half years of additional education have not been enough to compensate.

What do you call a school system that results in four out of five of the graduates being unable to read, write, or do math? A lobotomy factory. 

Millenials are Lazy

Millennials are, by their own admission, the least likely cohort of Americans to want to work hard. So says the new study by Jean Twenge and Tim Kasser, published in Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin:

We examined whether culture-level indices of threat, instability, and materialistic modeling were linked to the materialistic values of American 12th graders between 1976 and 2007 (N = 355,296). Youth materialism (such as the importance of money and of owning expensive material items) increased over the generations, peaking in the late 1980s to early 1990s with Generation X and then staying at historically high levels for Millennials (GenMe). Societal instability and disconnection (e.g., unemployment, divorce) and social modeling (e.g., advertising spending) had both contemporaneous and lagged associations with higher levels of materialism, with advertising most influential during adolescence and instability during childhood. Societal-level living standards during childhood predicted materialism 10 years later. When materialistic values increased, work centrality steadily declined, suggesting a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.

A "discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them" is, more-or-less, how a scientist would define "laziness." It's not laziness if you simply lack material wants - a Buddhist monk is not lazy. It is lazy to expect reward without effort. 

 

Jean Twenge's The Narcissism Epidemic should be required reading for understanding contemporary America. The Baby Boomers were the most narcissistic generation on record, until they unleashed their children on the world. 

Decline of the Mind - and Everything Else

This blog is a chronicle of decline; I called it decline of the mind, but it's not limited to just the decline of the mind - it's about the decline of many things. All that is, mankind has built through reason and will. As the mind declines, so too civilization.

14 IQ Points Lost Since Victorian Times

According to a research published in the journal Intelligence, the human population has lost around 14 points of IQ since the Victorian Era. The Daily Mail  reports: 

Researchers compared reaction times - a reliable indicator of general intelligence – since the late 1800s to the present day and found our fleetness of mind is diminishing.

They claim our slowing reflexes suggest we are less smart than our ancestors, with a loss of 1.23 IQ points per decade or 14 IQ points since Victorian times.

While an average man in 1889 had a reaction time of 183 milliseconds, this has slowed to 253ms in 2004. 

They found the same case with women, whose speed deteriorated from 188 to 261ms in the same period.

The report in the journal Intelligence found: ‘The Victorian era was characterized by great accomplishments. As great accomplishment is generally a product of high intelligence, we tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were actually cleverer than modern populations.
Researcher Dr Michael Woodley said: ‘They actually indicate a pronounced decline in IQ since the Victorian era, three times bigger than previous theoretical estimates would have us believe.’

‘In conclusion however these findings do indicate that with respect to "genetic g" [general intelligence] the Victorians were indeed substantially cleverer than modern populations.’

Commenting on the study, Dr James Thompson, honorary senior psychology lecturer at UCL and member of the British Psychological Society, said: ‘This is a very intriguing paper, which seems to give the lie to the comforting notion that we have all been getting brighter for the last three or four generations.

‘Reaction times are a real measure, with a reasonably large correlation with IQ, so this is an alarming finding and needs further investigation.’

Compare this to the so-called "Flynn Effect," which argues for a secular increase in IQ of 7 points for decade. Which is correct? Probably both - but it's not the relevant question. The relevant question is which effect is correlated with g, the underlying factor of general intelligence.

And there we see the bad news. The Flynn Effect has been shown to be uncorrelated with g, whereas reaction times have been shown to be highly correlated with g. At best, then, the Flynn Effect suggests that we've been masking a genuine decline in intelligence with improvements in test-taking and education.

But, as my TEDx talk points out, the improvements in test-taking and education have been stagnant for the last thirty years - nothing is left to hide the decline.

The Deluded Generation

In October 2010, I gave a Fidelity Leadership talk at NC State entitled "Reset Generation". It was a lecture on what the next-generation workforce was like, using videogames as an explanatory metaphor. The crux of the talk was that the next generation's workforce isn't so much "The Entitlement Generation" as they are "The Deceived Generation". I noted:

"As an employer, you will be the site of the first collision between the world that Gen Y was told to expect and the real world that awaits them: The reality of being young in America in the Great Recession is quite bleak."

  
Unfortunately, since 2010, the situation hasn't gotten better - it's gotten worse. Further confirmation of the ill situation came today in the form of a Yahoo! News ran an article today called "The Deluded Generation" which cites the following:

Numerous studies have found that today’s average young person thinks he possesses above-average intelligence.

Despite feeling smarter than their parents’ generation, today’s students self-reportedly study for fewer hours. On the bright side, they get better grades because of grade inflation.

“A third of high school students graduate with an A average, even though standardized test performance is unchanged or down and students actually study for fewer hours than they once did,” wrote Julia Twenge, a psychologist and author of the book Generation Me, in a previous statement to The DC News Foundation. “Students are getting better grades for less work, which is probably one reason why they feel so confident.”

The trend of self-delusion among teenagers is a particularly American problem, Kosakowski noted.

“The only things our kids rank the highest in are confidence in their abilities,” he said. “Math, science, and everything else has gone down.”